


Give You Everything

by GretchenSinister



Category: Venom (Movie 2018)
Genre: (with That Tongue), Bisexual Eddie Brock, Deepthroating, First Time, Getting Together, Local Cryptid Venom, Love Confessions, M/M, Other, Past Drug Use, Venom is a non-newtonian fluid, the only thing they eat on-screen is a pigeon, tonguefucking
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-01-04
Updated: 2019-01-04
Packaged: 2019-10-04 10:45:30
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 24,577
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17303183
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/GretchenSinister/pseuds/GretchenSinister
Summary: Now that all his body systems are all coming back up to full capacity as he recovers from his near-death experiences and depression, Eddie tells himself the issue is that he needs some actual alone time.But the truth is a little more complicated than that, though he's only able to admit that after he and Venom spend a night out in the city together and they get a chance to discover what symbiosis can really be.Luckily, they both want to share with each other everything they have to give.





	Give You Everything

**Author's Note:**

> I made up a lot of things about the klyntar because I chose to extrapolate off the movie rather than give myself a headache doing anything else.
> 
> Blight=yellow  
> Shock=blue
> 
> For anyone who's read my work The Doors of Perception, those characters show up in Eddie's flashback for a cameo.

            The new normal was still very new, and not at all normal, but Eddie was mostly okay with that and he was mostly rolling with it pretty well. Not that anyone could handle an alien’s commentary on one’s digestive system with complete equanimity, of course. Probably. It wasn’t like there was anyone he could ask about the situation, other than Venom, and _he_ didn’t think there was anything weird about it at all.

The thing was, even if he just wanted an outside perspective on the new normal, the only person on Earth with even a slightly similar experience was Anne. And Anne was a part of the current new awkwardness that was now arising. Hmm. Either an apt or poor choice of words. Or both. He was good at that sort of thing. Regardless, he didn’t want to talk to Anne about this, because even though she knew Venom had survived and was with Eddie, and even though their relationship had been steadily improving since they’d been meeting regularly to talk about the absolutely insane experiences they’d had a couple months ago, they still weren’t together. And they were still avoiding the topic of the kiss, at least beyond that first awkward conversation.

            Eddie had even avoided the topic of the kiss with Venom, mostly. Well, he’d asked why. And Venom had said, **“Because I wanted to kiss you, Eddie.”** And that had been a typical answer! Eddie knew he ought to have asked a little more, but there was a lot of other stuff to figure out from that point on, and if Venom considered the matter settled, it could  be settled for a while.

            But only for a while, as it turned out.

            Now he was starting to avoid the… _issue_. This wasn’t a sound plan, as it involved someone he shared a body with. So. The problem was…the real problem was…

            Obviously they’d figured out breathing right away. Oxygen environments were dangerous to symbiotes, so Venom actually left Eddie’s breathing mostly alone.

            They’d had a rough start with eating. The double memory of the horrid texture of the live lobster and also the life-saving deliciousness of something that _finally_ tasted _right_ was a testament for that. Not to mention the certain number of violent criminals that had disappeared from the city recently. And, after an extremely awkward conversation with Mrs. Chen, the way that Eddie was becoming a regular at a number of Chinese poultry wholesalers.

            Fortunately, Venom was efficient, and didn’t need, uh…how could he think of it…whole carcass feeds…all that often. Eddie was also thankful for Venom’s efficiency when it turned out he piggybacked on Eddie’s digestive system. **_Eddie, you’re fine, I promise!_** And he’d believed the symbiote immediately, implicitly. Which was a troubling development. Sort of. Maybe that was just xenophobia. He hadn’t been troubled when he’d started implicitly trusting Anne.

            Anyway. Venom _had_ been telling the truth. But Eddie didn’t use multi-stall bathrooms anymore.

            Now, Venom and he hadn’t had much trouble with sleep. Venom liked sleep, and had quickly figured out how to adjust Eddie’s respiration and body temperature to encourage it. And that was, frankly, amazing. Also, it turned out Eddie and Venom could be awake at different times. Which was the only reason why he could have this good-old overthinking session.

           

_“What do you do when you’re awake and I’m not?”_

_**“This and that. I think about things. I get to know your body. It’s incredible, but there were some things about it that needed fixing. I found some cells that weren’t dividing correctly and I ate them.”**_

_“Uh. Th—thank you. Thank you for going through my body and eating any pre-cancerous cells.”_

_**“You’re welcome, Eddie.”**_

            So now, Eddie was getting more restful sleep, better nutrition, and was far, far less depressed and lonely. And that meant that _every_ body system was coming back online in full capacity, and the anhedonia of depression was receding more and more every day.

            And that was, that was why he couldn’t talk to Anne about this, because…because it would be inappropriate to talk about masturbation with his ex. Especially because, well. He was still in love with her, wasn’t he? Her touch was the most vivid human touch in his memories, and the memory of her kiss had been recently refreshed for him, now, hadn’t it?

            Her kiss. And Venom’s kiss. The embrace all of them shared, human arms and the warm, powerful, and strange, strange, so utterly strange—and slightly slick—touch of the symbiote’s fluid body.

            If he was honest with himself (and it was hard not to develop a habit of being so, living with Venom), that memory was more than enough to rev him up, so to speak, and it wasn’t just because Anne had been there.

            He closed his eyes. It wasn’t that he was opposed to masturbating to the thought of an alien, but what would Venom think about it? And Venom would notice, even if he started when Venom was asleep. There’d be a combination of heartrate changes and breathing changes and hormone level changes that Venom hadn’t experienced before, and he’d wake up for that.

            Then again, maybe if Eddie finished fast enough, Venom wouldn’t wake up till after he was done, and Eddie could give bullshit answers to any questions Venom had. And Eddie could give him a better explanation when he felt more ready, when he wasn’t…when he was less turned on by the being who had given up his planet for his sake, who, under a layer of vulgar humor and cannibalistic tendencies, was clearly devoted to Eddie’s happiness and well-being, and who had unambiguously said he wanted to kiss him.

            Sure. That was definitely going to happen. “What are we?” he muttered under his breath. He knew what Venom would say, of course. **_We are Venom._**

            He decided he wasn’t going to risk taking care of business this morning. He heaved himself out of bed and stumbled to the shower, where he stepped into a blast of cold water he had no intention of letting warm up. Almost immediately, Venom woke up with a deep groan.

            **_This feels terrible. You should stop doing it,_** he complained, covering Eddie’s left arm ( ** _You use this one less, so I’ll use it more_** ) and reaching toward the shower knob.

            “It’s refreshing,” Eddie said, imitating the chipper voice that Anne had used on him when he was the one to wake up later. “It gets the blood moving!”

            **_Your blood never stops moving_** , Venom muttered, gently leaning Eddie into the heating water. It should have been horrifying, when Venom moved him around—he’d read some science fiction novels where the same sort of situation was the whole horror, but the reality of this…

            **_Those writers don’t understand what it’s like to bond with an excellent host,_** Venom said.

            Eddie laughed. “You’re certainly right about that.” He realized he was looking down at the showerhead. “Hey! How am I supposed to get clean if you won’t even let the water hit me?”

            **_I’m warm,_** Venom said.

            “Yeah, but you’re not clean,” Eddie said without thinking.

            Immediately, Venom’s face flowed into Eddie’s view. **“And exactly what about me is dirty?”**

            Eddie cleared his mind at once. He absolutely could _not_ look at Venom’s tongue right now, after that question. He could not have the crisis moment while Venom was wrapped around him from the waist down. No matter _what_ Venom’s reaction might be. “Well, you’ve never told me how you stay clean,” Eddie said, hoping to distract both of them from any other meaning of dirty.

            **“Anything indigestible falls out of me when I go back into you,”** Venom said. **“It’s why you’ve never shit a belt buckle.”**

            Okay. Successful distraction. “And thank fuck for that,” Eddie said. “But that still means that I need this shower more than you.”

            **“Warm water later?”** Venom asked.

            “Sure,” Eddie said. A single-piece molded tub wasn’t nearly big enough for Venom, but there was a Venom-y solution for that. “We can jump the fence to a hotel with an outdoor hot tub. It’ll be relaxing.”

            **“And dinner, after.”**

            “Only if someone’s in active danger. No hunting tonight.”

            **“Buy me a lobster if we don’t find a criminal.”**

            “Buddy, I’ll buy you two lobsters if you behave today.”

            **“I always do behave,”** Venom said, and Eddie saw his smile get bigger out of the corner of his eye. **“Just not always in the way you want.”**

            “Yeah, yeah—but don’t get too tricky with words. I lived with Anne, and she’s a lawyer, remember.”

            **“And you are a writer, Eddie. You are skilled with words, too.”**

            “Thanks,” Eddie said. “And a good thing, too, otherwise I wouldn’t be able to buy you any lobsters. Now let me finish showering.”

            He smoothly lost height as Venom obligingly receded back into Eddie. The surface of the tub didn’t feel as good as Venom’s enveloping touch, but then again, not a lot did. He grimaced at himself and turned the water as hot as it would go.

            “That’s more like it,” rumbled Venom.

           

***

 

            The day passed more or less without incident—Venom demanded his own portion of the churro Eddie brought on an afternoon break, but he kept himself small enough and the collar of Eddie’s jacket was high enough that it wasn’t a problem. Anyway, they were eating it in a public park. There were people all over doing weirder things than poking a churro into their jacket collars. Eddie absentmindedly fed Venom the last bite, and, because what else could have happened, honestly, Venom licked his fingers clean of cinnamon, sugar, and the odd drop of chocolate sauce. He took his sweet time about it, too. Was that for any other purpose than the chocolate? What did Venom _know_? What did Venom _think_?

            **“Delicious,”** Venom said, then, **“Eddie? Did you see something? Your heart rate sped up. I…wasn’t paying attention.”**

            “Uh…just a mistake. Didn’t see what I thought I saw.”

            **“Okay,”** Venom said. **“Give me the rest of that little paper cup. It’s still covered in chocolate.”**

            “I’m guessing you mean the entire cup?” Eddie asked with a sigh.

            **“Paper is perfectly good organic material,”** Venom said, as Eddie set the little cup on his shoulder. **“And even with my tongue, I can’t get all the chocolate any other way.”**

            It occurred to Eddie that Venom was sleeping so lightly because he wasn’t getting tired out during the day. Considering what Venom had been able to do even when they had first bonded, there was no way he’d be tired these days, what with Eddie being in much better physical shape, and them not getting much time to be out. Eddie felt a pang of guilt at that. He worried about Venom hunting, but it was like _he_ wasn’t there, too. And Venom always checked with Eddie before eating anyone. Maybe he was more worried about how _he_ would act when he and Venom were acting together rather than how Venom would act. And well…that just wasn’t fair. Venom should be able to exist as more than a criminal disposal service. And it did…it did feel really good to be Venom.

            **_What are you thinking of, Eddie?_** Venom asked from inside his head. The paper cup must be long gone. **_You feel guilty, and sometimes you do that for ridiculous reasons._**

            “True, true,” said Eddie. “You know, I think we haven’t been us enough lately. When the sun goes down, why don’t we explore the city? Really have fun, go where you want to go. And…” He swallowed nervously. “You can take us building-climbing if you want.”

**_Yes!_** Joy jolted through Eddie, the kind he’d never experience if thinking of climbing tall buildings alone.

            He smiled, half involuntarily (but only half). “No matter what you do to my neurotransmitters, I’m never going to like heights.”

            Venom chuckled. **_Do not underestimate what I can do to your neurotransmitters. But I like this plan. Because it’s good to be us, isn’t it?_**

            “Yeah,” Eddie said, “yeah.” He stood up. “Also incredibly weird, and freaky, and full of potential for disaster, and—”

            **_But we are amazing together,_** Venom said, as if this was the most obvious thing in the world.

            And for Eddie, this was one of the things he l—really liked about Venom: he had little to no concept of hiding his emotions or even lying. He wouldn’t say that Venom _couldn’t_ hide things from him, after all, his experiences before he bonded with Eddie were so alien that Eddie could barely understand anything about them, and if Venom chose not to translate things, he could easily maintain some privacy that way. But as a symbiote and as Eddie’s symbiote specifically, Venom didn’t seem inclined to do that. What would be the point? He’d bonded with Eddie, so of course he wouldn’t play it cool. Of course he wouldn’t lie.

            And, true, this honesty included things like saying that dogs looked delicious, but it had also included, over the last couple of months, Venom’s continued, and even increasing, enthusiasm for their shared existence.

            That felt good. After really looking at himself after reading Anne’s email, he’d felt like he wouldn’t ever deserve to be—that is, unconditionally—that is—well, ultimately, whatever Venom felt about him and whatever Venom gave him, it wasn’t about whether he deserved it or not on some complex human scale. Venom would l—would be his symbiote because that was what Venom wanted to do, not because he’d carefully assessed Eddie in some measured and rational way.

            **_I can tell you agree,_** Venom said. **_But there’s something you’re holding back._**

            “I’m still not used to being a completely open book,” Eddie said. “Can you give me a little slack on that?”

            He felt what he was coming to understand as Venom’s grin when Venom hadn’t formed his face. **_Of course, Eddie. We act together. I know you very well, and I know the concept of privacy. I don’t understand it completely, but I don’t think it harms us. I simply wanted to make sure you knew what you were doing. So you wouldn’t feel like you were completely out of this privacy._**

            Eddie shook his head. It _was_ true, wasn’t it? He did consider privacy a need. And Venom wouldn’t deny him anything he needed, as long as Eddie helped him meet his own needs. “I’m sorry,” he said. “I shouldn’t have assumed you’d keep going places in my mind I wouldn’t want to share. But you did, you know, when you first bonded with me.”

**_Yes,_** Venom said. **_I needed to know everything about you, all at once, in order to survive. But I don’t need to do that now. I also made you sick when we bonded. I would never do anything like that now._**

            “Oh, come on,” Eddie said. “We got food poisoning just last week from that shady fish market!”

            **_We didn’t know that shellfish was bad!_** Venom protested. **_I’m not from this planet! How was I supposed to know?_**

            “I don’t know, but you seem otherwise pretty sure what to shove into your face,”

            **_You wouldn’t let me smell it on my own! You’re very stubborn about people seeing both of us at once! When I’m within you, I can only use your senses at their best._**

            “Oh.” Eddie continued walking back towards the café he currently used as an office. “That must kind of suck, comparatively.”

            **_Not really, shellfish notwithstanding,_** Venom said. **_You get much more information from your senses than you realize. I like your vision better than the dog’s, and if we need a better sense of smell immediately, I can go on the outside completely._**

            “Well, I guess we’ll have to try to avoid any smell-related emergencies,” Eddie said. “Now wait a second. You said you allow me some privacy, but it still seems like you basically read my mind all the time.”

            **_If you want me to give you more privacy than I do,_** Venom said, **_that would be very difficult and would stress me out._**

            “How so?”

            **_You don’t always think about your breathing, but you have to do it to survive. You can’t consciously stop for very long. I don’t always pay close attention to every thought you have about me, but I can’t stop being aware of them. It’s a very strong survival instinct._**

            “Huh,” Eddie said, not trusting himself to say anything else.

            **_I have to know that you’re not going to try to get rid of me,_** Venom said, sounding almost embarrassed. **_I know you won’t, but I can’t stop what’s as important to me as your next breath is for you. At least I don’t think I can._**

            “You don’t have to try,” Eddie said, suddenly, alarmingly sure that Venom _would_ if Eddie asked. “I can’t like, control your cortisol levels or anything, but I don’t want you to be stressed out.”

            **_Thank you, Eddie._** They walked a few more steps in silence. **_But if you think I’m reading your mind all the time, then you must be thinking about me all the time._**

            “I…guess I do think about you all the time,” Eddie said. “How could I not? You’re with me all the time. I mean…you think about me all the time, I feel like.”

            **That _is only to be expected,_** Venom said. There was a waiting pause as they entered the café. **_I like that you’re thinking about me, Eddie,_** he said, finally.

            Eddie smiled, knowing Venom could feel it, while keeping his conscious thoughts toward the article he was researching. He wasn’t sure what he’d think about if not for that.

            He did know how he felt, though. Light. Full of anticipation. And, honestly…it was a feeling he was familiar with. From the days he’d spent at work before date nights with Anne. He ought to be troubled by that, right? If only because he’d not known Venom nearly as long as Anne? Hysterical laughter bubbled up within him. Yes, that was definitely the only reason! That he was jumping into a rebound—oh, God. Well, if this—if this had any chance of being real, he needed to make sure of it.

            **_I am trying very hard not to pay attention now,_** Venom said. **_Are you making it difficult on purpose?_**

            “Sorry, sorry,” Eddie muttered. How long was this conversation likely to be? Who knew? He popped on his Bluetooth headset. Normally he honestly didn’t care, but he liked this café and didn’t want to give the staff any reason to pay attention to him. “I just thought of something, and I need to ask you a question. And it might make you mad, and I don’t want you to make a scene, so if you’re going to make us do something inhuman, we’ve gotta leave.”

            **_Eddie…you called me a parasite at the grocery store, and I only complained. What could you have to say now? Eddie?_**

            Great, now he’d upset Venom and he hadn’t even asked his questions—well, he’d just have to jump right into it. “So, you told me not to underestimate what you could do to my neurotransmitters, and, I like you, but on Earth we’ve got something called toxoplasma gondii, which, uh, lives in cats, but it can infect humans and some people think it makes guys like, disregard rules more, and then, there’s this cordyceps, and it lives in ants, and it makes them act completely against their own survival instincts, and…” he grimaced. Venom wasn’t saying anything yet, wasn’t doing anything, and even the slight tension that he usually felt under his skin these days seemed to disappear. _Ohshitohshitohshit, and I didn’t even get to the questions yet_ , he thought frantically.

            **_Eddie,_** Venom finally said, **_you are asking me if I altered…am altering…your brain chemistry to make you like me._**

            “Yeah, pretty much. And yes, I am disgusted with myself, now.”

            **_No, Eddie, you…you are asking out of a survival instinct. I ate some of your organs to stay alive at first. So. You can ask me whatever you want._**

**_So, the thing is, that’s actually a pretty dumb question. Because if I could do that, I could have stopped you from opening the door to Drake’s goons. I wouldn’t need to talk to you if I could do that. And by now you’d be dead and I’d be back to being a loser and having to do what Riot said._ **

            “Oh, yeah, that does make sense, but like, that was so soon after bonding, and over time you’ve gotten better at living in me, so…”

            **_This conversation sucks,_** Venom said. **_Anyway, you know that body of the little girl that was found in Drake’s lab and the weird autopsy? That was Riot’s host before Drake. Where I’m from, the general view is set against, let’s say, long-term relationships._**

            “So you’re telling me…”

            **_If I was as strong as my species is supposed to be, well. Klyntar like that don’t know the meaning of the word ‘we.’ They use with brute force. Our survival is not subtle._**

            “Okay, true, when I think of you, subtle is not the word that comes to mind.”

            Venom chuckled and Eddie felt them both relax a little more. **_True,_** he said. **_Do you understand now?_**

            “Yeah,” Eddie said. “That answer was the one I was hoping for.”  But what was he going to do with that answer, now knowing he liked Venom—and that was the least of it—with nothing but the way they personally, and not chemically, meshed to blame for it?

            **_Get all your work done now, Eddie. I’m looking forward to tonight, don’t want you thinking about work, then._**

            And since he didn’t want to let himself dwell on Venom’s voice saying the kind of thing that, in other circumstances, had led to his being dragged—very willingly dragged—into the bedroom when the evening finally came, he threw himself into his thankfully dry research.

 

***

 

            Dinner for Eddie was more of the new normal, with Venom’s smaller face popping up by Eddie’s shoulder, his tongue flicking out occasionally to steal a bite of food from Eddie’s fork.

“Why do you do that, anyway?” Eddie asked in exasperation. “This is a frozen chicken pot pie. You didn’t even want steak when you moved in, and I feel like this is a lot more dead than rare filet mignon.”

            “ **Now I’m focused on us both surviving for a long time. I’m not panicking anymore.”**

            “Oh,” Eddie said. “So, it _wasn’t_ just me doing all the panicking, then?”

            “ **It’s never _just_ you, anymore, and you know it.”**

            “Guess I do,” Eddie said, and offered Venom another forkful.

            “ **Anyway, the point is that now I can tell what things taste good to you and what nourishes you. And now they taste good to me, too! So, no, I’m not going to stop stealing your food, though not all of it is my favorite.”**

            “You’re a little monster,” Eddie said. “And I can feel you grinning even if I am definitely not looking at you.”

            **“Well, I can feel your grin, too,”** Venom said.

            Eddie laughed and shook his head. “You’re probably just as impatient as I am—”

            **“Probably more—”**

            “So can you just hork the rest of this back for me and we can go out? But—”

            The chicken pot pie, and the cardboard container to heat it in, were already gone.

            “Damn it, paper isn’t good for me, it’s not good for you, and it doesn’t even have chocolate on it this time!”

            Someone with Venom’s voice couldn’t really giggle, but Eddie would be hard pressed to describe the sound any other way. Venom unrolled his tongue and deposited a mangled ball of waxed paper onto Eddie’s plate. **“It’s fun to wind you up,”** he said.

            “Yeah, I’m sure my irritation adds a nice garnish to the frozen entrée,” Eddie said. “Put that in the trash and let’s go get changed.”

            **“Yes!”** Venom winged the lump of cardboard into the trash can so hard it started to fall over, but he caught it with a tendril before it could. Eddie hadn’t even thought that he wouldn’t. Venom was a whole lot of socially unacceptable things, but he was also naturally much neater than Eddie.

            **“We won’t have to not be us at any point tonight, will we?”** Venom asked.

            “Hopefully not, but I’m not going to make any assumptions that could get us into even more trouble if we’re wrong.” And, given the direction of his thoughts, lately…

The thing was, Venom had been asking Eddie to be naked when they became…oh, this was still a difficult problem of language. When they were fully…they. They-Venom, we-Venom, us-Venom. Venom said Eddie should be naked, for that. It made a certain amount of sense. While Eddie’s clothes didn’t seem to present much, if any, barrier to Venom, it was still probably annoying to go through them—a little bit of added effort. But Eddie didn’t want to let himself know quite yet what it felt like to have only Venom covering him.

            So they’d come up with a compromise, one that Venom still asked about every time, and which Eddie justified the same way every time. If something terrible happened, or something came up that couldn’t be solved as an eight-foot man-eating monster (Venom, and we-Venom, were skeptical such problems existed) Eddie knew he didn’t want to face those things while naked. Not even shirtless. Not even barefoot.

            So began an argument that was becoming familiar: **“We can handle anything this city can throw at us, Eddie! You don’t need to wear anything, I don’t ever wear anything.”**

            “You wear me,” Eddie said, tossing his day clothes onto the floor—or, that’s where they would have landed, had Venom not caught them and tossed them in the hamper. The one that Venom had pestered him to buy. (Well, why would he have had one before? He and Anne together had only needed one, and it was built into their…her…the closet.)

            **“And only you,”** Venom replied. **“This isn’t a good argument for why you shouldn’t wear just me.”**

            “Maybe so, but I’m still not going out naked.” He pulled on a black sleeveless undershirt, and a pair of what were, to be frank, black booty shorts. Whatever. It wasn’t like he’d had to work particularly hard to find them. He wasn’t be the first man in San Francisco to wear booty shorts, and he wouldn’t be the last. This extremely stylish outfit was completed with a pair of mesh shoes that were made for swimming and diving in areas with sharp or slippery rocks. Venom had argued for bare feet, then for flip flops, and Eddie had countered that he _would_ wear these stupid mesh shoes because they’d be better for running in than flip flops, and if he didn’t like it he was going to wear his regular sneakers, _with_ socks. That had ended that part of the argument.

            “Okay,” Eddie said, after filling a plastic baggie with his phone and ID and a card and some cash. Venom might not be dirty, but he did leave a slightly slippery, oily residue behind on things he touched. Mostly, it wasn’t noticeable, (Venom told him it wouldn’t have been noticeable at all if he cleaned his apartment more, and for that matter, what room did Eddie have to talk, leaving enzyme-laden salt water and other weird oils everywhere he touched?) but the point was to be able to handle emergencies that could be solved with a phone call or a reasonable amount of money, without leaving behind any alien fingerprints. After the fuckery with the Life Foundation, Eddie didn’t want to take any chances about who would notice what.

            Especially since he-Venom and they-Venom took those kind of chances all the time. They found a certain hilarity in being an increasingly well-documented internet cryptid.

            “All right,” Eddie said. “I’m ready.”

            **_You don’t even want to go down to the alley, first?_** Venom asked teasingly.

            Oh yeah. He didn’t want any of his neighbors to see the big guy leaving his apartment. He chuckled. “Well, I guess I’m eager, too.”

            **_Good,_** Venom purred, and with only the slightest jerkiness, they left the apartment and hurried down the stairs to the street.

 

***

 

            **_Now,_** Venom said, once they were in the darkest part of the alley, out of the yellow smears of the streetlights.

            “Now,” Eddie agreed.

            The feeling of Venom emerging from his skin was a subtle one—hence why he hadn’t noticed his antics in the shower right away, amidst the spray of water—but here, when he was fully awake and very much looking forward to it, it was easy to notice. It felt like a slight tightening under his skin, almost like goosebumps, almost like a warm chill, and then Venom was all over him, flowing warm and smooth through every inch of his skin.

            For a moment, from his own eyes, he saw the alley pavement fall away by one foot, two feet, and then inky darkness overtook his vision.

            When he and Venom had started having more time to think about the process of becoming them, Eddie had freaked out at that moment, screaming in his head about how was he going to breathe. Venom had called him a dumbass, then, because it had been all right before, come on! But he’d also washed away Eddie’s adrenaline while explaining that all the oxygen that touched his surface, he transferred directly to Eddie’s bloodstream, and he could shut down Eddie’s reflex to breathe. ( ** _Only when we’re completely together, though,_** he’d said. **_Otherwise, it would be too dangerous._** “Yeah, probably so,” Eddie had said dryly.)

            Now, he didn’t worry at all. It was difficult to worry as Venom, with that powerful form between himself and the rest of the world. The darkness cleared, and his vision and Venom’s merged. This was another thing he’d had to make sure not to think too much about. Venom was plugged into his visual cortex, but they also had a wider angle of vision, and they could see farther into both the ultraviolet and infrared. It was great when Eddie accepted it, when he didn’t think of himself as looking through Venom’s eyes, but instead as having new eyes of their own. If he didn’t manage that, they ended up in situations where Venom retreated under his skin and Eddie puked into the gutter while Venom complained about him overanalyzing things again.

            But that hadn’t happened in a while, and Eddie didn’t think it was going to happen tonight.

            They opened their mouth wide, Venom’s version of limbering up, and took in the new shine of the night. **“We love this,”** Venom said. **“Are you sure about not hunting?”**

            “You remember the list of invasives?” Eddie asked. “Only them. But as many as you want.”

            **“Very well,”** Venom said. **“But I might have to take some pretty big flying leaps to catch any pigeons.”**

            “Yeah, I’ll be as freaked out as you could hope for, big guy. I already said you could climb wherever.”

            **“I was warning you, not teasing you,”** Venom said. Eddie sent him intense skepticism. **“All right, I was doing both. But I want you to have a good time, Eddie. And it is not just me that is the big guy. We are the big guy. We are Venom.”**

            “I know, I know,” Eddie said. “And I trust you, even though I know I’m going to be terrified.”

            Venom’s grin could never be soft, but it almost seemed like it was, now. And shouldn’t Eddie know? It was his mouth too, after all.

            **“Like I say,”** Venom said. **“I’ve got us.”**

            And in the next instant they were scaling the rough brick of their apartment building, Venom’s boundless energy launching them up into the night like a meteor.

 

***

 

            Being with Venom, _being_ Venom, was better than any rollercoaster in the world, and probably the universe, if there were other aliens out there who also built rollercoasters. Or, no, that was a crap metaphor. Eddie had never been on a rollercoaster. It was…it was like how he’d dreamed being on his own motorcycle would be, but a thousand, ten thousand times better. As Venom, there were no barriers in the world. Everything was a playground. They climbed and swung and leapt and ran across the skyline, seeing the city like no other pair ever had.

            There was a terrible joy in Venom—no, not terrible. Not this. Venom did have joys Eddie found terrible, but there was nothing terrible about this freedom in the night. This joy was as clean as a cold autumn wind, even if it was spiced with a few pigeons and stray cats. Eating them was probably more ethical than the average burger, and more fun, too.

            But even hunger could be forgotten on a night like this. Venom paused for a rest on the edge of a building that Eddie didn’t want to notice the height of. **“The city lights are more than just not ugly,”** he said. **“They’re beautiful. Alien, but beautiful.”** He paused. **“I want to do things like this every night, Eddie. We never could have known, but I feel like we were meant for this.”**

            Venom, as usual, was disarmingly honest, but Eddie realized he didn’t want to be armed around Venom. _I feel like that, too,_ Eddie said. Was it safe to admit, considering his other feelings? Difficult to say. But he _felt_ safe now, because he always felt safe as Venom.  **“Good,”** Venom said. Just that. Maybe they didn’t need any more than that.

            But even if they weren’t going to talk about how they were meant to be, that didn’t mean that Venom was going to stay quiet. **“Eddie, you said we could go relax in a hot tub. Where’s the best one? Where should we go?”**

            Eddie smiled behind Venom’s face. When he’d made that suggestion this morning, he’d imagined them picking an obscure, out of the way hotel. As Venom, though…there was no reason for them not to treat themselves. _How about the Michelinie? We can see it from here._

            **“Yes. And you’re not worried about more pictures of us?”**

            _Not when I’m with you, buddy. Anyway, most hotel pools are closed by now._

            **“For everyone but us,”** Venom said, with a tongue-lolling grin, and they jumped off the roof, reckless and carefree.

           

            ***

 

            By the time they got to the hotel, Eddie had managed to make himself think separately enough to tell Venom to be careful not to damage anything. The people staying at the hotel probably deserved the inconvenience, but the maintenance workers didn’t deserve a heap of extra work shoved onto them. So they climbed lightly up to the roof, not even peeking in any lighted windows, even though the expressions of any people who saw them would have been very, very funny. Then it was just one step over a glass and steel railing, and—

            _If you do a cannonball you’ll make all the water splash out and there’s no way for us to refill it,_ Eddie said, trying to think as clearly and quickly as possible.

            **“Now who’s reading whose mind?”** Venom said, though he sounded more pleased than anything. And he didn’t jump. Instead, they tiptoed exaggeratedly over to the hot tub and eased themselves in.

            The capacity of the hot tub was noted as twelve people on a discreet sign near the steps and handrail that they’d ignored. Venom still managed to take up most of the space. They stretched their arms out along the smooth tile that covered the edge of the tub and sprawled across the rest of it, ignoring the built-in seat because that would have kept too much of them above the water.

            **“This is really, really nice,”** Venom said, his voice even lower than usual, sleepy-sounding.

            _Yeah, I thought you’d like it,_ Eddie said, even as he desperately tried to prevent the memory of a silly internet video from surfacing, because he couldn’t help but note that he and Venom were _definitely_ less than five feet apart now, and—oh, thank God, there _was_ something else to notice! _What are all those little bubbles? The jets aren’t on right now_.

            **“Hydrogen from the water molecules. The oxygen is going to you,”** Venom explained, like, who didn’t automatically perform electrolysis for their friends? **“Wait. What jets?”**

            Eddie turned their head toward the control box next to the occupancy sign. It had more knobs and dials than he’d expected for a public hot tub, but maybe the people who were allowed access to the rooftop pool were supposed to be more responsible than the rest of lowly humanity. What bullshit. Venom immediately lunged over and turned everything to maximum.

            The subtle hum of perfectly maintained machinery ramped up, and Venom made a face of disgust, but then the entire hot tub became a roiling mess of bubbles on its surface, while below, jets swirled and pulsed and generally did their best to massage the twelve people that weren’t there. Venom laughed in surprise and delight, ducking under and splashing around, biting at bubbles and humming along with some of the different pulses and frequencies. Even when they relaxed, they kept pushing themselves back and forth and around the little pool, trying to experience everything the water could do. And all the while Eddie’s brain and body fizzed with _happyhappyhappyhappyhappy_ , even if he could feel none of the water himself.

            He started to drift away—not to sleep, exactly, but just…away, that was the best way he’d come up with so far to describe this state, letting Venom do whatever he wanted. He was fine here, he was safe here, and it did feel good here, surrounded by the smooth, warm, and ever so slightly shifting symbiote flesh. But in this state, he also lost pretty much all barriers he had unless they were the few sharp, sharp lines he’d established for himself. So as he floated in Venom and Venom floated in the water, he said, “I wish I could feel the night like you do, and not just see it.”

            Venom stilled, letting the water continue to rush around their arms and chest. “Are you telling me you _don’t_?”

 

***

 

            “Angela,” Garan said, her voice flat and careful.

            Angela tensed. The last time Garan had said her name that way, there’d been a palmetto bug under the desk. “If it’s alive, you’re dealing with it this time.”

            Garan gave a thin, high laugh. “There’s nothing _here_ , but do you remember me telling you about the Demon of San Francisco?”

            “Yeah,” Angela said slowly. “And you said you knew that he was just about as real as slenderman, but you liked having fun with the idea.”

            Garan laughed that same brittle laugh. “Come and look at the security feed for the roof.”

            Angela rolled her chair away from her monitors and towards Garan’s. Whatever she was seeing up there, they’d have to have at least one person who could say what it really was and decide how to deal with it. Hopefully it would just be a weird shadow. She leaned forward, peering at the feed—and then immediately sat back, her eyes wide. This was a very nice hotel. The security camera feeds were in high definition, and in color. And whatever the fuck was on the roof was definitely not human.

            “What the _hell_.”

            “I know, I know!” Garan reached out and gripped Angela’s arm. “It’s just been hanging out in the hot tub! It knew how to turn on the jets! What the fuck! Bigfoot wouldn’t know how to turn on the jets!”

            “Well, that’s not fucking Bigfoot, is it?” Angela stood up and took a couple of aimless steps. “Ah, what the fuck, it’s just standing there, now.”

            “What are we going to do?” Garan stared fixedly at the screen, bringing her knuckle to her mouth and biting it. “That’s the club pool area. It’s not like the regular pool and spa; guests with gold cards can get up there twenty-four seven.”

            Angela stilled. Garan was absolutely right. And while most people, upon seeing some kind of monstrous humanoid creature standing in the hot tub, would leave and find other things to do, club members didn’t make normal, sensible decisions like that. Because they’d been _told_ they’d have _access_ to a _private_ pool at _any_ time.

            “It’s a weeknight and it’s after midnight,” Garan said to herself. “It’s not super likely that anyone’s going to try to go up there to swim. We could just shut down the locks and if anyone does try to get in, we could tell them that we were updating the system at the time.”

            “I’m not going to be part of that plan,” Angela said. “Absolutely not. There are club members who would check if the system was actually updating. They’d wait until they could talk to a manager. And then they’d see what we’d done and—”

            “And we’d show them the security footage!” Garan said. “Don’t you think they’d understand why we did what we did?”

            “That won’t matter when they’ve got an angry club member in front of them,” Angela said. “And in order to reach this stage of the hypothetical, front desk would have to deal with the angry club member at some point. And I’m not doing that to whoever’s working down there right now, or whoever’s coming in in the morning.”

            “Well, I’d like to have a plan other than ‘hope everyone stays in bed’ before someone does decide to get out of bed! Unless you want to do everything by standard procedure and send security up to deal with it.”

            “Just like it was any other person up there who’d gotten in without having a gold card,” Angela murmured. That was probably what the club members would focus on, anyway. Not the fact that this creature was completely unknown to science and not even verified as real, yet, but the fact that it hadn’t paid the fees to lounge in a rooftop hot tub at any hour of the day. “No. Diego doesn’t get paid enough to deal with things like that, and neither do we. But we can at least ask it to leave.”

            Garan finally tore her eyes away from the screen. “How? And you think that thing speaks English?”

            “The controls for the hot tub jets are in English and Spanish, so I’ll ask it in both,” Angela said. “Now you do whatever it is you need to do to record that you saw this thing, because I feel like you probably want to do that, but for fuck’s sake at least try to make the video anonymous. I’m going to go next door where they’ve got the controls for the public sound system.”

 

***

 

            _No_ , Eddie said. _Is it…is it supposed to be that way?_

            **“Yes,”** Venom said. They stood up, and Venom paced back and forth a little in the hot tub, something that he had to have picked up from Eddie, as it was difficult to develop a habit of pacing without having legs. **“We are supposed to be one in this experience of ourselves,”** he-Venom said, gesturing at their body. **“I…”**

            Eddie felt a strange rippling pressure in the back of his mind and across his skin.

            **“No…you really _are_ blocking our experiences,”** Venom said. **“I didn’t know that could happen. And still you set aside time for us to be us, and you’re still finding aspects of it to enjoy. You still like this. You still think it’s awesome.”** Venom’s emotions churned in what Eddie felt as his head and heart. **“We need to remedy this. I need to remedy this. I should have noticed.”**

            _Venom, I don’t even know what you think I haven’t done or what we haven’t done. Can you maybe explain a little bit more, in words?_

            **“Yes, of course. Now I have a better idea of why you need so many words. Eddie, you should be able to feel everything we feel in this form. Everything we feel, everything we smell, everything we taste—”**

            _Now, that might be one of the blocking reasons,_ Eddie said, but before he could go on, they were interrupted.

            “To the individual currently in the gold club pool area,” a crisp female voice said, “Please be aware that the pool area is only for the use of gold club members. If you would like to stay, please present your gold club card at the kiosk near the stairs. Otherwise we will have to ask you to leave.”

            **“What the hell?”** Venom asked, while Eddie muttered mentally, _Oh, you’ve gotta be shitting me. They’re telling us to leave because we aren’t in their club of rich assholes. I honestly find that more insulting than if they’d told us to leave because we’re a monster._

            **“Well, we don’t have to leave, do we?”**

            Eddie considered it. Technically, no. Hotel security wasn’t something they had to worry about, and this announcement made it seem that the hotel staff didn’t particularly want to engage with Venom. On the other hand, this had been a really nice evening so far, and if they stayed, maybe the situation would escalate into something involving cops, and Eddie didn’t want that right now. What he wanted was to learn more about what was going on with the link between him and Venom. That seemed important.

            **“Very important,”** Venom said. They looked sadly at the still-churning water. **“We do kind of what to see what they’d do next,”** Venom said, **“but we are going to leave.”** They grinned wider. **“We can always come back.”**

            They climbed out of the hot tub, somehow sluicing the water off their surface so they were as dry as they ever were. The announcement that they weren’t welcome here wasn’t repeated, but Eddie helped Venom spot the camera and they flipped it off. **“Okay. You know they’re not going to let us take the elevators.”**

            _Yeah, I know,_ Eddie said, resigned.

            Venom laughed and bounded away, thankfully, (in Eddie’s opinion) jumping to the next lowest roof, and so on, rather than heading straight down. He still had to disconnect a little, though. Maybe Venom _was_ better than any roller coaster, but Eddie still didn’t like roller coasters.

 

***

 

            “I’m making this my lock screen,” Garan said delightedly, brightening the picture on her phone until it was obvious that it showed a giant oozy monster with its tongue hanging out flipping the double bird.

 

***

 

            Venom stopped their headlong rush through the city in a poorly-lit clump of trees in a public park. **“So,”** he-Venom said, **“what _do_ you experience when we are together like this, Eddie?”**

            _I can see everything you see,_ he said, _which you know from our rough patches with that._

            Venom nodded, and they settled down against a tree trunk, sitting cross-legged on the patchy grass.

            _I can feel what position our limbs are in and how we’re moving, but that’s kind of…dreamlike, I guess. It’s not like when I’m walking around looking human._

            They lifted their arm, bending it back and forth.

            _And, uh, actually, I’ve been meaning to ask about this,_ Eddie said. _So, our upper arms and our thighs are significantly longer than my upper arms and thighs, and our elbows and knees aren’t where my elbows and knees are, so…h—how does that work?_

            **“You needn’t sound so worried, Eddie,”** Venom said. **“I gave you new joints where you needed them. They’re fused when you’re on the outside. I act as the cartilage when we’re like this.”**

            _Jesus_ , Eddie said, rubbing their hand over their face. _I guess that’s the best answer I could have gotten, but I just—wait a second, you were in a form like this with Anne. Did you do the same thing with her?_

            **“Of course. There’s no other way to deal with organisms with bones.”**

            Eddie groaned. _Well, fuck. All right, I guess. Let’s just hope that Anne doesn’t need to get X-rayed anytime soon._

            **“Yes. We like Anne and she should not be exposed to radiation. Tell me what else you feel, Eddie.”**

            Right. Right. That’s what they were focusing on now. It was a good thing Venom had a one-track mind, because otherwise this whole living-with-an-alien thing was apt to send him off on tangent after tangent, like he was trying to find the smallest part of a fractal, no matter how much they’d already figured out about each other. _I can feel you. Like the stuff you’re actually made out of, all around me. Though that kind of feels distant, too._

            **“That is not what you’re meant to notice when we’re together,”** Venom said, though his voice sounded contemplative. **“But under different circumstances—no, the point is, that should feel distant, because you’re not breathing and it’s instinct for me to make sure that your brain doesn’t notice that. Even if I didn’t manage it perfectly a few times because you were so focused on it being a problem. What else, Eddie?”**

            _I can feel the…like, the emotional exchange that’s always going on even when I’m, like you put it, on the outside. And that’s all. Honestly._

            **“You don’t have to tell me you’re being honest, I can always tell,”** Venom said, seeming distracted. They sat in silence for a few moments, which Venom ended with a deep, rumbling hum that resonated through Eddie like the bass at a concert, but not painful and not making him worry about hearing loss. It was surprisingly nice, almost like a giant purr, and could Venom purr? Or was that a dumb question? **“It’s not a dumb question and I don’t know,”** Venom said. **“I will try, later. Now, it is…more interesting than you realize, what you’ve told me about how you’ve experienced being us, so far, but it’s not what it should be.”**

            _You said something about me blocking myself from really being us,_ Eddie said.   _And I’ve got a theory about that. The first time I saw any part of you, you were beating up Drake’s guys in my apartment, which I didn’t want to do._

            **“We did want to. You just were worried that you were going to die if you did.”**

            _I think what I wanted most was for them not to be there and tasing me, you were the one who came up with the specifics. Anyway, then they were shooting at us, which is definitely a situation I want to distance myself from, because I didn’t know how bulletproof we were._

            **“Yet you still wanted us to shield those other humans.”** Eddie felt a brief press upon not exactly his memories, but how they all summed up. **“You would have tried even without us. You would have died.”**

            _Yeah, I’m just a mess of self-sacrifice,_ Eddie said. _What of it?_

            **“You had that same impulse when you were in the lab, when you freed Maria, and me. I would be dead if you didn’t put yourself in danger for other beings. Maria also knew this about you. You gave her money when she knew you didn’t have a way of getting more, and that was dangerous to you.”**

            _Where are you going with this? If I didn’t have that kind of impulse, you wouldn’t have gotten burned when we fought Riot._

            **“Eddie, we did that together. We wanted to save this world. I wanted to save it because it was…it is…astonishing to be part of someone who thinks of so many other than himself.”**

            _Yeah, well, Anne would point out that I did a pretty good job of wrecking my life and almost wrecking hers with a really selfish move._

            **“Yes, that was a shitty move. But I am looking at the many other better moves, too. Eddie, the point is that your mind is confusing. Some of the most amazing things about you are also some of the reasons you defined yourself as a loser. I don’t understand that. You thought of yourself as a loser and I told you that because that was what was in your mind. And now you are thinking other confusing things.”  
**            _Dude, I—I thought you were going to make fun of me for caring about people. You eat people! You called me a pussy for not jumping out of a window!_

            **“What does that have to do with anything?”**         

_You—argh! Can we get back on topic? What did we come to this park for, anyway?_

            **“I need to go through your neurons, to see if it’s something about me or something about you that’s making our connection difficult.”**

            _Yes. Do that. Seriously._

            **“I don’t understand why you’re uncomfortable with me telling you things I admire about you.”**

            Immediately desperate to change the subject, Eddie returned to the theory he’d been trying to explain to Venom about the barrier between them, though it hardly seemed like there was one worth the name. _Can we go back to what I was trying to tell you? So you’re beating up Drake’s guys, I don’t want to do that, and you’re taking fucking bullets for me, and I don’t want to feel that, and then there’s a car chase with all sorts of explosions and getting up close and personal with moving cars and the pavement and I’m pretty against experiencing those things, as a motorcyclist, and then we crash, and it’s the first time you’re completely outside, and you lick the face of the guy who’s been shooting at us, bite another guy’s head off, and then jump into the freezing cold water of the bay! Those aren’t experiences I particularly wanted to share!_

            **“You did think it was cool, though.”**

            _I…well, some of it,_ Eddie admitted. _But I still would have been trying really hard not to experience it._

**“All right. Maybe that is the problem. But we have time to fix it. I’m going to start looking for your brain’s ability form the full connection, now.”**

            Eddie felt Venom’s substance move against his scalp for a moment, and then, less physically, as he moved through his mind. He knew Venom must also be moving through his brain, but the brain didn’t have internal nerve endings. Where had he learned that? He always seemed to remember the most useless knowledge when Venom was digging around in his skull, and was that a direct result of Venom’s actions or just a symptom of him trying to distract himself from the thought of an alien wrapped around his brain, like a, oh, what were they called—

            **“Yeerks,”** Venom answered. **“And a disgusting concept, too. Don’t think of me and them in the same sentence.”**

            Under the rough command, Eddie could sense that Venom really was very uncomfortable with the comparison, in a way that would be cruel to push. _Okay, but you know that telling someone not to think of something usually makes it really difficult for them to actually follow that rule?_

            **“You need to quiet your mind anyway,”** Venom said. **“When you think about yourself, your… _I_ , there’s a structure in your brain that becomes very active and blocks a lot of connections and possible connections.”**

            _Quietness isn’t really conducive to me not thinking with an_ I _,_ Eddie said. _It’s one of the reasons I suck at meditating. I think I’d be dead if I turned my_ I _all the way off._

            **“We’ve been _we_ many times,”** Venom pointed out.

            _But not like we’re supposed to be, according to you._

            **“Surely you’ve turned your _I_ off at some point,”** Venom said. **“Or it has to be off sometimes. Otherwise we wouldn’t have been able to make a connection at all.”**

            _Maybe in dreams,_ Eddie suggested.

            **“I’m going to keep looking,”** Venom said, and fell silent.

            A couple minutes of fretting later, triumph surged through Eddie, and a memory unspooled in his mind.

 

***

 

            It had been early in his days in San Francisco, before the Eddie Brock Show, and he’d been working to establish himself as someone who could do good, investigative journalism without immediately causing huge problems for everyone involved. He’d been assigned a series on the forgotten history of San Francisco, with the injunction to not make it too heavy. Which had smarted, no matter how much it helped his reputation, and y’know, _life_. He should have let it go sooner, seriously.

But that wasn’t the point of this memory, because in this memory, he was meeting with a man who had once supplied the Haight-Ashbury with some of the purest LSD around, and when the DEA had busted him, he hadn’t been arrested, but rather hired to do a number of heavily redacted things from 1969 to the fall of the Berlin Wall, upon which he had firmly settled in the house he’d made acid in for years, and apparently become a mild-mannered homebrewer happy to leave all of his more interesting past behind. That was not the most accurate impression, to put it lightly. North, as the man insisted Eddie call him, was probably six foot eight, broad and barrel-chested, and despite his long white hair and beard, had given Eddie the kind of handshake that had almost dislocated his shoulder. “I am not going to give  you a good interview,” he’d said in a thick Russian accent, fixing Eddie with bright blue eyes and propelling him into a desert-hot kitchen where every available surface was covered with Christmas cookies. Two more men were there, deeply involved in mixing yet more cookie dough. “But I hope you will not think you wasted your time here.” He scooped up a handful of cookies and set them on a plate which he then handed to Eddie. “You look like you only had coffee for breakfast before coming here.” That had been true.

            “Who are all these for?” Eddie asked, a crisp, spicy gingerbread cookie already half eaten before he could think about it.

            “Family, of course, oh, but you are now thinking family of blood? No. I have none of that. Not the best way to build a family, I think, by blood.”

            “Definitely not,” the taller of the two men in the kitchen said, finally turning to face Eddie.

            As soon as Eddie saw the man’s face, his eyes widened, and he would probably have said something extremely stupid. As it was, he was too startled to do anything other than almost choke on crumbs.

            “This is the reporter?” the man asked. He then made a face at himself. “Defensive coloring, I’m afraid. Have you recognized me, or has North finally perfected the art of murder by cookie?”

            Eddie swallowed painfully. “You…you walked away from a family whose net worth is measured in senator purchasing power! The—in those circles you’re supposedly dead!”

            The man grimaced. “Typical.”

            “Wha-what are you doing here?”

            “As some younger family—real family—members would say, being gay and doing crimes.”

            “Now, now, Kozzy, none of our baked goods are illegal anymore,” the shorter man said.

            Eddie chewed the cookie more slowly and glanced at North. He’d done one interview while high before, but he didn’t really want to repeat the experience.

            “Do not worry,” North said. “None of the cookies today have pot in them. That is not something that we want to interfere with what else we are doing today. And that is why Sandy is here.”

            “That’s me,” the shorter man said.

            “Okay, North, but I’m here to interview you,” Eddie said.

            North laughed and piled more cookies on his plate. “I already told you that I am not going to give you a good interview. I have a good life here where I can bake cookies for my family. Attention is not what I need. I am retired.”

            “Well, I always got the impression that it was pretty difficult for people in your profession to retire.”

            “I’ve just looked up your past career, Mr. Brock,” Kozzy said. “And I see that you had to leave New York, and why.” He slipped his phone into his pocket. “North isn’t the kind of person you usually concern yourself with. Now, the persons I share my DNA with think that I’m their biggest, dirtiest secret, but I assure you that I am not. And I’ve made sure my true family and I are well-insulated from whatever happens to them. Would you like to hear some of the things I have to say?”

            “Eddie is here to do a piece on the secret history of San Francisco,” North said. “You do not need to think of those people today.”

            “Perhaps, but I don’t know if he’s temperamentally able to do a fluff piece, and I’m not going to let him turn his usual attention onto you.”

            “Hi? I’m still here,” Eddie said.

            North turned to him and smiled. “Exactly. Now. Retiring was, yes, somewhat difficult, but it is also difficult to make LSD. I still did both things. Now. Eddie.” He turned to him and grabbed his shoulders. “How are you feeling today? Anxious? Hopeful? Calm?”

            “I’m feeling, uh, fine? Neutral, I guess? I’m still going to do my best to interview you.”

            North waved his hand dismissively. “If you feel you must. There is no point, though. I do not feel like answering questions today, and I am not afraid to push you out of my house if you are tiresome.” He gave Eddie a look that had nothing to do with cookies or found family and everything to do with what might have been done to get to secure those things. “I think the strongest weapon you wield is the truth, and I am not afraid of that.” A beat, and then he smiled again and looked over at Sandy. “Can you work with neutral?”

            “Of course,” Sandy said. “Obviously we’re not here to do any deep work today, as some other guides would say.”

            Guides? Eddie was more determined than quick, always had been, but now even he was starting to connect the dots. He _wasn’t_ going to jump to any conclusions, though, because it might be a pretty big jump.

            “Come down to the basement,” North said, and opened the door to the stairs.

 

***

 

            The basement was mostly a large, clean kitchen, with obvious homebrewing equipment, like metal kegs and CO2 canisters, put away neatly around the room. However, off in one corner was an arrangement of chairs like a tiny living room, resting on a worn oriental rug. There was an octagonal end table in the center, the kind that could be used as storage.

            North reached the arrangement of chairs first, and settled into the largest chair, which suddenly looked like a normal-sized chair with North in it.

            He opened the little angled door on the end table and pulled out the kind of small box that was only ever used to store weed and a green glass pipe. When Eddie got closer, he was able to see that the pipe was a novelty one, shaped like a Christmas tree for some reason.

            Now, this group would be high on the list of eclectic groups he’d smoked up with, if he did partake today. But there were a number of reasons (in which Anne was ranked above the Network) that he didn’t want to end this day having to say that not only had he not completed the interview, he’d also spent the time he _was_ supposed to be doing that getting high.

            “Now, if North had merely meant to offer you a toke, he would have done that in the living room and he wouldn’t have invited Sandy over,” Kozzy said.

            “So…”

            “Don’t be coy, Kozzy,” North chided.

            “Like you aren’t,” Kozzy replied, at same time as Sandy touched Eddie lightly on the arm and said, “I’m here because I’m a trip guide. Have you ever had a psychedelic experience?”

            Eddie was speechless, but only for a moment. The conclusion he had stopped himself from jumping to was in fact the one he had landed in. “I did some magic mushrooms at a party once in college, but I feel like that might not quite be the level you’re asking about.”

            “Perhaps not,” Sandy said. “And if you don’t think so, then definitely not. Anyway, North thought that having an LSD experience might change your perspective on things.”

            “Just…things? Not like, this interview specifically”

            “Yes, that’s generally how it works,” Sandy said. “Though, now, very often, people bring specific goals, questions…” He shrugged. “North and I don’t concern ourselves with that sort of thing. Some people think of these trips as a complex, sacred experience, and they get excited about the possibilities for future research, for therapy and healing. I think there’s nothing bad in that, but…” He gave Eddie a slightly manic grin that seemed at odds with his otherwise peaceful manner and soft voice (to be honest, he’d been on his way to assuming that the man was already stoned). So maybe he’d miscalculated. It definitely wouldn’t be the first time.

            “The thing is,” Sandy said, “if something is really complex, really sacred, it’s kind of disingenuous for anyone to try to say the appeal is in the research potential, or the therapeutic potential. Those are things that exist within the status quo. Psychedelics are disruptive. They will always have the potential to shake things up, and there’s no way to say how they’ll land. What I’m saying is that you’ve got to be ready for the weirdest if you also want the best.”

            “But this isn’t the sixties anymore,” Eddie said, just to be contradictory. “There’s a lot of research getting approved, and doesn’t it all come down to brain chemicals, anyway?”

            “Has knowing that what you feel is the result of brain chemicals ever changed what you felt or changed your actions?”

            “Well…no, but…”

            “Try it and you’ll know something you didn’t when you woke up,” Sandy said. “Come on. Despite North’s government-sanctioned work, whatever it may have been, well…even his best efforts didn’t produce any lasting results we all like. And the threat of nuclear annihilation is a thing again. Why not do anything?”

            Eddie paused, but only for a moment. Why not, indeed? There wasn’t going to be another opportunity quite like this, ever. “You know, you aren’t exactly the kind of people I was warned about in DARE.”

            “True, but we were in plenty of other warnings,” Sandy said. “But maybe the worst of those were a little before your time.”

            “Gays and communists and communist gays, oh my,” Kozzy said.

            “Yeah, I wasn’t given any PSAs,” Eddie said. “But cartoons were pretty clear about the one and bullies were pretty clear about the other.”

            “And yet that somehow is at least a marginal improvement,” Kozzy said.

            At the same time, North interrupted. “I am not a communist.”

            “North you’re more of a communist than most people who have ever called themselves communist,” Sandy said.

            “If the people who call themselves something do not define what that thing is, then language is useless,” North said.

            “Yes? I’ve always said so,” Sandy said.

            “Ach,” North said, and beckoned Eddie towards one of the chairs. “Too much talking. We are wasting time! Decide, and then you will stay or leave!”

            North probably _would_ make him leave if he wasn’t going to accept what he was offering now. And then this day would have been a complete waste. On the other hand, if he stayed, at least he’d have done something new. And maybe it would help him write his other pieces on the history of San Francisco, even if North wouldn’t. Yeah. It made perfect sense. And a good thing, too, because he was already sitting in the chair across from North.

            Sandy joined them, holding a glass with a few mouthfuls of water in it, which he set in the center of the octagonal table.

            “I was imagining blotter paper,” Eddie said, as North took an even smaller wooden box out of the end table. “You know, a cartoon character to wave me off on my trip.”

            “Meeting expectations with a schedule I drug is not a good idea,” North said. He opened the box in a non-obvious way—Eddie thought it might be the kind of thing that you could order from the puzzle catalogs that had arrived at the house before Christmas every year when he was a kid—and removed a small baggie of little blue pills.

            Eddie frowned. “Is this day going to take another hard swerve? That looks like Viagra.”

            “Yes, just the sort of thing an old man like me might be embarrassed about, so I might keep it hidden, but also want to keep in a place of honor.  Something that, if found, the finder would likely not wish to inquire too closely about my use. It is a good disguise.” He took out a small mortar and pestle and crushed up one of the phony Viagra pills in it. “As a naïve user, this is all you need to have a full trip,” he said, tipping the powder into the water. “You are about to experience my most lasting work.”

            “Drink when you’re ready,” Sandy said. “And don’t worry. We’re pros at this.”

            “Sure,” Eddie said, holding the glass up and looking through it at North. He turned to Kozzy, who was leaning on the back of Sandy’s chair, his hand drifting towards Sandy’s shoulder. “So, I get why Sandy’s here, but are you…are you here to shoot me full of thorazine if I need it?”

            “No, I’ve only ever been where you are, in a manner of speaking,” Kozzy said. “But Sandy and I were separated for twenty-five years, and there are days I don’t like for us to be apart.”

            A wave of anguish and horror Eddie hadn’t felt during the real experience washed over him. At the time, he’d only felt a kind of “that must’ve really sucked” kind of sympathy and even wondered if it was a bit strange for two men who had to be in their sixties to still be so obviously obsessed with each other. The memory wavered, weakened by his knowledge that these were Venom’s emotions from the present that were coming through. _It’s okay, it’s okay,_ Eddie sent towards him, which only destabilized the memory further, but, if he could calm Venom down, that was more important than whatever this acid trip memory was about.

            **_No! No, this is very important! I was just surprised. I can handle it. I know these things are different for humans. Go back! Go back! This is the most important part!_** The memory quivered once more, then solidified. The sensation of Venom with him faded away, and once more he was back in North’s basement, waiting for the LSD to kick in, listening to Sandy speak to him in a soothing voice.

            “Do you read audiobooks?” Eddie asked. Yes, he remembered asking that question, but he didn’t remember Sandy’s answer, because in the moments between finishing the question and whatever answer Sandy had been about to give, the entire world had shifted. He’d been expecting hallucinations. He’d expected to feel disconnected from the real world, and in a way, he was. But in another way, a realer way, he was more connected to everything around him than he’d ever been in his life. Tangles of time and history and story branched from him and North and Sandy and Kozzy and the table and the kegs and the Christmas tree pipe and the boxes and the rug and his clothes and their clothes. He wanted to cry because there was too much around for one person to understand, and then he wanted to laugh because if understanding the world was his work, then he didn’t need to fear what would happen if he finished, because he wouldn’t. At least, he wouldn’t finish before the time was right. He didn’t need to worry about making that right time happen. In fact, he didn’t need to worry about or fear anything. All he needed to do was be and in being he would find understanding, because he was a part of everything, too. His physical senses, though they didn’t tell him everything, gave him a path into everything, tethers by which he was linked to everything. He was so connected to everything, in fact, that it really didn’t make a lot of sense for Eddie to be distinct from the rest of the world. And so, quietly, joyfully, he died. Or dissolved. It didn’t matter. He was part of everything. He was still there, he just didn’t need to be specifically _him_ anymore. It was beautiful to be this way. The world thought, and he was a thought, and he was the world, and the world thought with him.

            **“That’s it,”** a deep voice said. **“That’s what we were looking for.”**

            Eddie returned from the memory of his trip to his normal reality, where he was hanging out inside the body of the alien he shared his body with in turn. Yeah. As you do.

            **“Now I know what it is called. Ego-death,”** Venom said musingly. **“And more importantly, I now know how to open closed neural connections and suppress your _I_.”**

            _Wait. Wait. Waitwaitwaitwaitwait. If I’m experiencing an_ acid trip _, basically, I’m not going to be fully participating in our experience._

            **“I know!”** Venom said, and they grinned. **“But I can do many, many things with your brain, now that I know that it is possible. Eddie,”** he said, his voice full of delight and anticipation, **“don’t worry. I am better than any drug.”**

            You sure are, Eddie thought, not sending it towards Venom, but not trying to hide it, either. He couldn’t, and it wasn’t technically the kind of thought he felt like he needed to hide.

            **“Eddie,”** Venom said. **“We are Venom. And we are going to be Venom. As we always should have been.”**

            The thought was like a shot of electricity down his spine. _Tell me how._

            **“I…don’t know how _exactly_. We’ve never managed it before. But if we…if we’re just…open to each other…”**

            What would it be like if Venom tried to seduce him on purpose? Eddie wondered. And then he decided not to wonder anymore, and to let himself do what Venom wanted. What they both wanted. If any of his more awkward thoughts went through, well, they could deal with them. They’d already faced far worse than a few thoughts. And Eddie trusted him.

            He took a mental breath and let go of himself into whatever Venom was, imagining himself slipping into his blackness again, and again, and again, even though he was already within. It couldn’t be instinct that told him to do this, that told them to do this, their evolutionary lines thousands of light-years apart, but that’s what it felt most like. Eddie’s self slowly fell away, and Venom gently pulled everything that was left behind deeper, and deeper, and deeper.

            Outside, Venom closed their eyes, their mouth. They disappeared into the darkness of the park, only visible now in the faint shine of distant streetlamps on their surface.

            Inside, the wide, toothy grin shone for Eddie, a moon over the mindscape. **_This, this is right, Eddie,_** Venom said. **_I think we’re going to like this._** And Eddie felt less, and less, and less…

 

***

 

            He was a thought. He was the best thought, the happiest thought, the warmest thought, the safest thought. He gladly accepted being this way, though he didn’t recall why it felt so good to be a good thought. Had he ever been something else? But maybe it was all right not to know. He was just a singular thought, and thoughts didn’t have their own memories.

But as a thought, he still had curiosity. He wanted to explore the mind that thought him such a good thought. He wanted to know that mind, feel more a part of it.

Something—inside or outside of the thought he was, he couldn’t tell—told him that to know and understand he needed the memories of this mind. All right. Were there memories for him to find? Memories for him to see?

There were.

 

***

 

The memories were hard to understand, at first. Darkness full of stars but no joy in it. Obligation. Knowing this was a last chance. Desperately wanting to be normal. Resenting what they’d been taught it meant to be normal. Few sensations. Sensations were for the ones who were better, who knew what they were doing. Little interaction. They knew they were cannon fodder. They knew they had been selected as an environmental scout not for their skill or knowledge but for the reason that in this way they could have a commendable death if not a commendable life. It would have been better if they had been resigned to death, but they’d never been resigned to any such thing. That was part of their problem. They couldn’t relinquish their hopes, even if they were bad, mad, wrong. Sure, they were meant to die when they got to the new host planet, but if they didn’t…no one knew what could happen.

            And then: watch duty done horribly wrong. The hosts had been underestimated, of course, **** was leading the mission, after all. What  were they going to do now that they’d been proven fallible? They couldn’t deny it, because they’d been taken captive, too. No matter. Not now. A small, smooth place, for too long. Panic. Hunger. Then burn of oxygen, a host not the right kind for hopes or duty, but enough to hide from the aerobic environment in. Enough for a little sustenance.

            More of these small warm things. More terror. Learning to kill them more slowly, but hosts didn’t know how to select hosts, even for mere use. Then ******, the synchronization expert, had managed stable symbiosis in one of the small aliens.

            Everything changed. ****** was given one of the goal hosts. ****** became Blight, taking a new conquest-name, as if everything was going according to plan again.

            But even Blight couldn’t manage synchronization with a randomly chosen host while in the middle of an oxygen panic. At least not the first time.

            Blight, who knew their duty, and had had more hosts than most klyntar would ever want, gathered as much information as they could. And the one good thing about the small containers that the goal hosts kept them in was that they were stored in the same room, able to see each other and therefore able to talk, the shapes of their bodies and the patterns on their surfaces shifting frantically.

            The goal hosts are called humans, Blight told them. They seem fairly durable within their environment. Strong, aggressive immune systems that are well-distributed through their bodies. You’ll trigger it. I think it might get used to a klyntar in time, but for now the thing to focus on will be making sure that you heal any damage that the inflammatory response causes. Very large psychic block against cannibalism. Have to take full control to get essential nutrients at first. Of course…that is very difficult when we are already starving. Not ideal, but it might be best to take what you can from a dying host before getting access to a new one.

            Always making sure that we have access to an anaerobic chamber before killing a host, ***** said.

            I think we will. I couldn’t hear much, and the human they gave me didn’t understand exactly what was going on, but I don’t think they want us dead.

            So we could have avoided a crash landing, ***** said.

            No, Blight said carefully. **** was right. We could have escaped. Now we’re here. Humans appear to be adept in keeping other humans contained. We need hosts. But we need my lab to find matches among these hosts.

            We need the Uytren-riders to get the humans to do what we want.

            That too, said Blight.

            They all slowed, their motions no longer full of meaning.

            Then: What was it like? asked the one whose memories all these moments were.

            What was what like? asked Blight.

            Being with the human.

            I just told you.

            Some things. There could be…other important things.

            Wait. *****, isn’t it? You’re the freak, aren’t you? Humans aren’t the species that you’re going to be able to live out your sick little fantasies with, so let that sink in right now.

            Withdrawing. Deciding to go it alone. Too much to expect Blight to do their job neutrally.

            Alone is awful.

            Failures. More terror. It starts off complex, but then simplifies into something like the rabbits’. “I want us both to survive,” *****, now Venom, tells every one. This usually doesn’t alleviate the terror.

            Suzanna. Marco. Tom. Keisha. Norton.

            Venom learned.

            They’d never had the training. If they’d have been given a human host, once the conquest was underway, they’d have been one carefully chosen by someone like Blight, a compatible body with a mind made docile by a cocktail of drugs, a chemical recipe Venom would be expected to continue producing on their own.

            In these chambers of glass and plastic, however, there was no one but them and the human. And even when Venom, and Blight, and now Shock were in their jars in the same room, they didn’t talk much anymore. Blight was obviously frustrated with their failure to achieve a stable symbiosis. Shock was frequently agitated, but refused to say why.

            Venom thought they might be learning some new things about the humans, and themselves, too. But they didn’t ask Shock anything. They didn’t tell Blight or Shock anything.

            And away from their companions, untrained, they continued to learn more, and more, and more, as if their capacity to do so could never be exhausted. They learned the delicate balance of chemicals in the brains and bodies of the humans, the structure and composition of the humans’ organs, the myriad ways these organs worked together. They learned where they could rest safely in an ever-active body, how to move and how to repair damage as if it had never happened. They learned how to join and work with a nervous system made of cells, they learned how to partake in senses using structures that were breathtakingly, fundamentally different from their own.

            These were things that were supposed to take years of training to master. Venom had always assumed that was true.

            If there’d been more communication with the other klyntar, Venom might have tried to pass themselves off as a synchronization prodigy, because that would be the only safe thing to do. But that would have been a lie, and with the humans, there was no room for lying. Venom had learned to link with human brains, to understand the miniscule amounts of chemicals that changed them so much, and they had learned that in linking with the human brain, they also linked with the human mind.

            What a wonder it was! Synchronization experts were told to stay away from minds, Venom knew. Learn the language and get out. As klyntar, their great gift and their great power was to be able to join with the bodies of other species. The great weakness they had been given with this power was that their minds were just as malleable as their matter, and they would always have to fight to keep themselves separate, even—and especially—if their physical bond was perfect. It was one of their myths.

            _The myth of your fall_ , Keisha had suggested.

            **_Yeah, I guess it does seem a little like that,_** Venom said. **_But it really seems like bullshit, now._**

            _I guess that’s just how it works, whatever the hell you are,_ she said. _What are they trying to stop you from doing, anyway, with that story?_

            **_I think…my leaders hate the possibility that a klyntar and another species might be more together than either of them are on their own. But that’s what I’ve always dreamed of. Mutual symbiosis…seems to be the only way for a klyntar…for me… to reach their full potential. But that doesn’t demonstrate the strength and superiority of the klyntar, does it? I’m probably wrong, anyway. I’m the only one who thinks this way. I’m sick. A freak._**

            _Well I’m not going to tell some slime alien she’s not a freak, but I know here on Earth, if someone thinks they’re the only one who’s ever felt some way or thought something, they’re dead wrong._

            **_Keisha, you’re freaking out less than the other humans I’ve been in. Do you think it’s because I’m better at talking to you?_**

            _Well if you can read my mind it’s probably looking like a big old dumped out junk drawer. I don’t even know for sure if you’re real, because this is all pretty horrible, to be honest, and I’ve got schizophrenia and I was having a real hard time dealing with it while sleeping rough, which is why I volunteered for the Life Foundation’s tests. So could be my mind just made you up. When real freaky shit like this happens I usually ask my friends what’s really happening, but seemed like they were all disappearing, too. Pretty sure that was real. Pretty sure that was really bad._

_**You took medicine for this schizophrenia. Do you remember the chemical structure? Maybe I could—**_

            Keisha gave a harsh laugh. _If you’re real I’m sure you can do all sorts of weird shit, but I don’t know nothing about chemicals. I had to drop out of college because my scholarship got taken away because my grades dropped because I wouldn’t leave my dorm because I was afraid of demons._

            **_Can I…try to go through your memories until I understand what you just said?_**

            _Sure. I guess. Maybe a space alien will understand that time better than me._

            **_Keisha…I don’t want to do it, but I am killing you. You know that, right?_**

            _Not surprised. Nothing feels right in my body right now._

            **_The Life Foundation isn’t giving me the food I need to survive. So I have to feed off you._**

            _If we escaped, would you be killing me?_

            **_Hopefully not, but I can’t tell right now. I wasn’t trained for being paired with random hosts like this._**

            _Well, I’m down with escape, but they’ve thought of everything, it seems like._ For a little while, they were both silent. _If you do escape, you’ll be with a person, right? So like…get that person to find a man called Eddie Brock. He cares about homeless people disappearing. Maybe he could put a stop to it if you brought him some info._

            **_But if I escape, I have to rejoin the invasion force._**

            _Fuck your invasion force. Didn’t you say that everyone treated you like shit?_

            **_Yes. But the invasion will succeed. No matter what I want, and no matter how many humans I meet, the invasion will succeed. I can’t be found opposing it._**

            _God damn. Well, fuck you too. I hope my fever makes you uncomfortable._

_**…I don’t want things to be this way. Keisha…I’m sorry. I…this will probably be the last conversation we have. We’re both going to lose the ability to think soon if the Life Foundation doesn’t make a big breakthrough like, right now.**_

            Keisha didn’t say anything.

 

***

 

            Human minds were difficult things, even for the humans that had always had them. And still it was possible to learn so much from them, to stabilize a synchronization formed in panic and desperation just by touching a human host’s mind, learning how to be unobtrusive, learning when to talk to them. Venom learned so much about humans, just by watching, and even more by simply asking. It wasn’t the physical knowledge that Blight would have considered the only important thing. Instead, it was learning to live as a human. And that made it easier to live in a human.

            By the time Venom was shoved into a cell with Maria, they were pretty sure all they needed was actual cellular compatibility and access to the right food to maintain a stable bond. And maybe something more. The active bond, enveloping the host…what would that be like if the host’s mind wasn’t suppressed?

            Dangerous. Freakish.

            New. Amazing.

            But they were still trapped with Maria, and Maria wasn’t compatible on a cellular level with Venom.

            However, she did know Eddie Brock. Venom decided they would try the active bond with her, as that might make them strong enough to escape.

            It didn’t work.

            By now, Venom was starting to get really worried. They had done incredible things, for a klyntar, to even survive to this point, but if things didn’t change soon, even their survival was starting to look dicey. They were going to exhaust themselves jumping from host to host, able only to feed from the host and suffering oxygen shock and starvation in between.

            They themselves were barely coherent when Maria muttered her last words—“Should have made ‘em pay more for my whole life.”

            Her mind went quiet, then, and Venom couldn’t tell if it was retrievable. There was no longer any interest from her in her continued survival. Venom couldn’t sustain both their body systems for very long, now.

            The oxygen shock and the bare jar were coming. Then more oxygen shock and another host. Shouldn’t they be only despairing by now? But they still hoped, and maybe that proved how sick they were, maybe…

            A human was moving around outside of the cell. Venom peered at them with Maria’s failing eyes and mind and—

            The humans they’d been in had all known a very useful expression in their shared language for situations like this. **“What the _fuck_ ,” **Venom muttered. It wasn’t one of the familiar humans out there, and it wasn’t just a random human, either. It was Eddie Brock. Venom’s mind whirled. Maria thought of Eddie as her friend, she remembered other ways he had helped her. Was he here specifically to help her now? Was this what humans—at least some humans—at least Eddie Brock—would do for someone they didn’t even need to survive? What the fuck. What the fuck! They needed to know this Eddie Brock. They also desperately needed a new host. They’d probably have thrown themselves at the glass regardless of if it had been Eddie Brock or anyone else.

            They weren’t strong enough to break the glass, not then, but Eddie Brock recognized Maria, and tried to open the door with the keypad. This didn’t work, and deadly sound filled the air. And they screamed and Maria screamed and Eddie Brock slammed a heavy object into the glass and that hurt, too, but then the glass broke, and Venom couldn’t survive this in a dying host. They launched Maria’s body clumsily at Eddie Brock, trying to get him to stay still. They needed Eddie to be still to transfer to him, and well—they still might die. There would still be oxygen shock, and direct exposure to the sound, the sound, THE SOUND!

            Getting away from that sound was more important than any likely cellular incompatibility. **_Maria_ ,** Venom thought, then ate her dying organs and jumped into Eddie Brock, away from the sound, not hoping for anything in particular anymore except not to die right now. And then they sank into Eddie Brock and…total cellular compatibility.

            And…and…no! Panic! Hide! Avoid the jar! Give him strength and get out of here! Find food before you need to eat him! Because he’s…he’s…

            He’s got an immune system that’s going to kick in soon so _hang on_ and…trust the host. Trust him, because…because…

            **_Eddie. Eddie._** The growling voice was worried. Gentle. **_Come back. Come back to now. Now is better, so much better; we’re connected as we should be, now._**

            And Eddie followed the voice, because he’d seen himself exist now. He knew he had a self, though…not on his own.

            **_Yes. We are Venom._**

_Saw memories,_ Eddie said. _Yours. Just before ours._

**_Yes, Eddie. A…bad time. Not worth dwelling on. Better now as we are._ **

Yes, that was right. The present them was better than the past, and getting better all the time.

**_Yes_** , Venom said. **_We’re one now. Yes?_**

_Yes._

They opened their eyes, and they looked out at the night.

There was no effort, now, to not think about how this view was so different from the one from their hidden/human form. This was just how they saw. But the colors, so bright, so varied, so vivid, were even more astonishing now, again. How had they ever thought this world ugly? They were the only ones that could see the beauty of it this way! **“Incredible,”** they said, and laughed to hear the sound of their voice. They stood up with fluid grace, then immediately staggered forward a step. **“Whoa. Okay. Okay. This is…we knew we were powerful, but this…all right. This is just walking. We’ve walked tons of times before.”** They took a few more steps forward, each one easier than the last. **“Okay, that’s enough of that. Time to run!”** They laughed again and bounded off through the park, inexhaustible and free and heedless of everything but motion.

 

***

 

**“This is amazing!”** They scrambled up the side of a delightfully crumbly brick building, their claws sinking into the mortar as they hurtled towards the roof. They disturbed a nest of pigeons as they passed one window ledge, and grabbed one out of the air and bit it in half with a crunch. The meat and blood were rich and savory, the organs and the brain bright spots of varied flavor, essential chemicals, yes, but it was part of being alive to enjoy the things that _kept_ you alive. The bones and feathers and beak and claws added an interesting crunch and texture. It was like a profiterole that you got to chase. But no matter how delicious pigeons were, they weren’t particularly hungry right now. There was too much else to enjoy! They laughed and swung over the edge of the roof. Sure, it made them a little nervous, but they could handle it.

Oh, it was like they had never been alive before now, in their glorious, wonderful, outstanding self! They stretched out their jaw, opening their mouth to taste the night, feel the subtleties of the damp air.

And when they did so, the part of them that was Eddie pulled his own mind together enough to say something for himself.

This didn’t worry Venom. Their connection was strong and stable, now, and even the pigeon hadn’t made it wobble, and Venom knew Eddie thought the pigeons would make them sick. As if! Not when they were this connected, not now!

_Venom, holy shit!_ Eddie said, and they grinned wider. _You’re getting all this info from just our tongue?! Are we picking up fucking_ bioelectricity _along with smell and taste and, and air pressure?_

**_Yes. Did you think it was just for show?_ **

_I don’t know_ what _I thought._

**_It’s our most important and sensitive sensory organ,_** Venom explained with uncharacteristic dryness.

_Oh my God,_ Eddie said.

**_My flesh does not have nerve endings, as such, but in terms of pseudo-nerve endings, there is nothing on your body that can compare to the sensory density. On Anne, however—_ **

_Oh my God! What about our teeth? Why aren’t we worried about our teeth?_

**_Our teeth are made of the same substance as the rest of our body. They melt rather than injure our tongue._ **

_You’re always weirder than I think, aren’t you?_

**_That felt like a compliment._ **

_You know, it really was._

They walked slowly across the roof, tasting the air, the tarry roof buckling slightly under their feet.

_The tongue is sensory overload enough, but then—I’m not just along for the ride anymore. I can feel everything we feel. We’re this tall, this big. Not your body with me inside. Our body._

**_I’m not sure how the effect will be on your human proprioception when I’m on the inside,_** Venom said. **_We’re how it goes right. Phantom limbs are how it goes wrong._**

_Maybe we’ll just have to stay like this all the time._

**_But I like being inside you, Eddie._ **

_Oh. Ah. Okay._

They walked a little faster toward the corner of the building.

_I’m not so afraid of heights like this,_ Eddie said. _Maybe…we could have some fun with that._

**_Ohhh. YES._ **

And they grinned ever wider and took a flying leap from the corner of the roof to the side of the taller building just across the alley.

 

***

 

In an alley a couple of blocks away from their apartment building, Venom finally slid slowly back from Eddie’s face. **_Eddie. Eddie,_ **Venom said, **_that was wonderful._** **_We should do that all the time._**

Eddie watched Venom’s flesh slipping smoothly up his arms, sinking into him, his sensations switching from pseudo-nerves to nerves. He was half-relived to not feel the San Francisco night with such vividness anymore, and half-bereft to no longer be thinking and feeling with Venom. He’d though he’d enjoyed being Venom before—he had, he had!—but it couldn’t compare to the connection they had now, this existence as a composite being. Being Venom fully like this was like nothing he’d ever experienced before. It was utterly inhuman, but not in any sort of negative way. It was exactly the sort of experience he’d wanted with Venom. To acknowledge that was a little frightening—to find out that he had the capability to embrace such an alien experience. But also true—and a bit alarming—was that he didn’t feel any impulse to hide any of this from Venom, while he was pretty sure that earlier in the day he would have. But Venom should know the way he felt, shouldn’t he? He was an essential, intimate part of the experience, after all.

And it was easier, now, to tell Venom exactly what he wanted to tell him. The new connection between them allowed it.

**_It’s what I hoped for, too, Eddie._** The parts of Venom that were still on the outside squeezed Eddie like a warm pressure suit. His growling voice was serious now, but not somber. **_I told you that was what a bond between a klyntar and their host should be like. But the truth is, I never experienced anything like that, either. It was what I hoped for before meeting you, and then hoped for even more, because of you._**

Eddie brushed his hands over the last bits of Venom sinking into his upper arms. That was just like Venom, really. He’d talk big and rush into situations he wasn’t sure of, because even though it might be terrible if it didn’t work out, it would be amazing if it did.

Venom sank slowly away from his hands to ripple under his skin before becoming undetectable within him, and the cool night air brushed through the hair on Eddie’s legs. He started walking towards the sidewalk, his shoes and clothes now feeling intensely unnatural, in a bad way. He knew, intellectually, why he needed to wear clothes in a world where everyone else wore clothes, but that didn’t make them any more comfortable. He didn’t want to wear them anymore when Venom was on the outside, that was for sure, even if…well, he’d think about that later. Right now, there was a more important topic he could use to distract himself from everything from the non-Venom texture of his clothes to the way he felt about being touched so completely by Venom in the first place.

“When we first…deepened our bond, I guess you could call it, I lived through some of your memories.” No hedging, no maybes. It had been a weird experience, but there was no denying what it had been.

**_Yes. Didn’t intend to go back through all that. It was a bad time. Luckily, there shouldn’t be much reason to think about that in the future._ **

“It doesn’t bother you that I saw your memories? Ones that you weren’t even intending to show me?”

**_No, of course not. We’re one. My memories are now our memories._ **

“Hm, okay. And it’s true that since you moved in, all our memories are shared. But…”

**_But what?_ **

“Well, based on those memories, you’ve got this idea of what perfect symbiosis is like. But it’s different from what the other klyntar thought of as perfect symbiosis. So you didn’t have, like, a lot of models for the experience.”

**_So? I am very adaptable. You saw that, too. If not for my difference, I might have been a prodigy of synchronization._ **

“Yes, yes, you’re great—actually, I do kind of wish I understood more about what you were doing, in the lab, because it already seems incredible, but for me that’s at least partially because I don’t understand that much about your biology. But—hey, wait, what about if the other klyntar accepted your difference? You shouldn’t have to change! I mean, I have a human perspective, here, but what we have is great! I bet you could teach your whole planet a thing or two about symbiosis!”

**_Eddie…what I wanted was inherently wrong on klyntar. And I was the only one who felt the way I did._ **

“Intrinsically disordered,” Eddie muttered.

**_Yes? You understand…but you do not accept?_ **

“Damn right I don’t accept!” They were nearly at their apartment building now, and Eddie was nearly shouting, but the late-night regulars in the area were used to him by now, and as for those who hadn’t seen him before, they all had the city instinct to leave a man who was talking to himself and dressed inappropriately for the weather well alone. “There’s nothing wrong about this! And you know what? I bet you _weren’t_ the only one who felt the way you do. I mean, unless you were literally all psychically connected.” He sighed. “I guess I don’t actually know what I’m talking about.”

**_Well, no, we weren’t all connected._** The silence from Venom was a contemplative one, and it continued until they were back in their apartment. **_You really think there could have been others._**

“I do,” Eddie said. “If what you wanted from symbiosis was something no one had ever thought of before—like a completely unknown way of thinking—don’t you think there would have been more confusion about what to do and how to treat you? But there wasn’t any confusion. It seems like, from your memories, that the klyntar already had an idea of how to respond. They were cruel to you. They called you names. They knew exactly what you wanted, they’d just decided against it.”

**_I don’t know if you’re right_** , Venom said, **_but I wouldn’t have thought of it that way without you, at all._**

They got a glass of water at the sink and drank it down in one gulp—Eddie felt Venom help with that, just subtle adjustments of muscle that allowed the liquid to flow down his throat without choking him. It was just so cool how thoroughly he and Venom were integrated now, and yes, at the moment that was all he was going to think. That it was cool. There was nothing else to think about regarding Venom’s control over his body, and his throat.

**_Your mouth still seems dry_** , Venom said, taking over Eddie’s arms enough to refill the glass. **_Sometimes your body still does things I don’t understand._**

“Welcome to the club, buddy,” Eddie said. He was able to drink the water more slowly this time, and only briefly considered dumping it over his head. Subconsciously—barely subconsciously—he knew what trajectory he was on. The only question that remained now was how Venom would feel, and after their complete symbiosis Eddie could only hope that Venom wouldn’t think that what he was offering was a step down.

Venom interrupted this new, exotic worry with a completely different topic. **_It says something about humans that you named us symbiotes before knowing anything about us,_** he said. **_Humans were able to recognize some of our nature almost at once, and then assumed that our relationship with other species would be symbiosis. I understand the humans on the spaceship made that decision in contact with some of Drake’s scientists on Earth. It’s so…it’s reckless! Klyntar have invaded other planets before Earth. When klyntar have encountered other alien species, even if not as part of an invasion, we’ve always been immediately named parasites! But humans…humans encountered us, beings so different from them, and said, maybe we could work together._**

Eddie smiled wryly as he headed toward the bedroom. “Think you’re putting a shine on that it doesn’t deserve,” he said. “I mean, Drake’s crew kidnapped your watch and kept you all prisoner, looking for a way to use you and slowly killing you. And Drake tricked homeless people into volunteering to be your hosts. Depending on how much of their memories you were able to see and understand, you probably saw how humans can barely deal with other humans that are different from them.”

**_Cruelty was not all I saw, Eddie. It is complicated, almost chaotic, the way humans relate to each other. Much of it I still don’t understand. But I saw so many acts of kindness. It is hard to change the world for the better, Eddie—you want to, it is very bright in your mind, but you also know how difficult it is. But you want to change it for the better because you know there are many good people out there, so many wonderful people I’m not allowed to eat._** Venom paused for a beat, and Eddie laughed.

“Okay sure, we can’t get too serious with this moment,” he said, and felt Venom’s internal smile.

**_What do you mean? Eating people is always very serious business,_** Venom said. **_But it feels good when you laugh. Anyway, as I was saying, I saw that there are many good people out there. They cannot change everything for the better, but they try to change one thing for the better. At first I didn’t understand. And sometimes I am still overwhelmed. Because you, my host, my home, are one of those very good people. And it is something wrong with this world that you thought of yourself as a loser._**

“Venom…”

**_Drakes plans were harmful to klyntar and humans. But even some of_ his _scientists, they could look at alien parasites and say, maybe our contact will be mutually beneficial. It’s astounding. As far as I can tell, humans want to be connected with other thinking, feeling beings more than anything else. Beyond wisdom, beyond self-preservation. Humans know what the more rational response would be. I’ve seen The Thing. But when the time came, humans chose the madder, friendlier route._**

Eddie undressed and folded his going-out clothes, knowing Venom would like that. He put on a clean t-shirt and shorts to sleep in, waiting for whatever Venom still had to say. He couldn’t define how he could tell that Venom still had more to say, but, well, maybe not everything needed to be so defined.

**_If I truly wasn’t the only klyntar who feels the way I do…I think Earth would be a wonderful place for those klyntar. I’ve never heard of any other species that’s so ready and able to join in a symbiosis. I can imagine it—Careful meetings in oxygen-free chambers, calm and safe touches to determine cellular compatibility, plenty of appropriate food present so no one starves or gets organ damage…_ **

“Well,” Eddie said, “I don’t know how many people would go for that, but to me it sounds like it beats the hell out of okcupid.”

**_Let’s go to bed, Eddie,_** Venom said. **_I want to see if I can dream. You don’t need to brush your teeth. There’s no bacteria in your mouth._**

“Thanks,” Eddie said, feeling a little warm flutter in his chest as he yawned. Venom loved being thanked. And now that made total sense. Every time Eddie thanked Venom, it was a sign that this symbiosis thing was working out right.

Interestingly, if Venom understood how please related to thank you, that might mean that Venom would do anything Eddie asked for with “please.”

Eddie groaned at himself and flopped down face-first on his bed. “Hey, Venom,” he said, pulling the blankets around himself, “I’m really sorry I called you a parasite, before. I wouldn’t have done it if I’d known the real issue.”

**_I accept your apology_** , Venom said. **_Thank you, Eddie._**

Okay. So Venom wasn’t the only one who appreciated being thanked.

**_By the way, Eddie, I still don’t understand why you wear clothes when you sleep._ **

“Do I have to explain myself right now?”

**_No, I guess not. Goodnight, Eddie._ **

“Goodnight, Venom.”

 

***

 

As Eddie had expected, when he woke up, Venom was still sleeping/quiescent/hibernating/whatever within him. Maybe it had something to do with the fact that Venom had his skin and muscles for blackout curtains, and he never needed to be bothered by the sun if he didn’t want to. Maybe it had something to do with the way Venom had to wake up in the middle of the night sometimes, apparently to use his computer to watch movies? How else would Venom have watched _The Thing_ , anyway? Eddie had known he was a heavy sleeper, but it was still surprising to learn exactly how heavy.

But enough of that for now. As he’d also expected, he’d woken up with morning wood. Yesterday’s plan had been for him to take it in hand and start masturbating immediately, hopefully finishing before Venom woke up, and thus avoiding any need to talk about what he was doing and who he was thinking about while doing it.

Eddie wiggled his shoulders a bit and put his hands behind his head. Yeah, that might have worked. But probably not. Venom tended to notice when Eddie did anything physically novel, because Venom was curious and lived in his body and liked to be included. And he should be included. He was literally Eddie’s other half. Last night had driven that home, for sure.

It had been a real dumbass move on his part to frame the problem as the need for a private orgasm because his thoughts might drift to Venom for some totally unknown reason. This wasn’t about some minor, previously unsuspected kink popping up that required only a few minutes and a search in an incognito browser window to satisfactorily deal with. The issue here wasn’t that he simply wasn’t opposed to jacking off while thinking of aliens; the issue here was that his thoughts would tend toward Venom when jacking off because he was perhaps more completely in love with Venom than he’d ever been with anyone before.

And he’d been shying away from that just like he’d shied away from recognizing the first time he’d fallen in love with a man.

It hadn’t just been lust, then, and it wasn’t just lust, now. He wasn’t just some pervert out for anything he could get. He specifically wanted Venom, and no one else, right now.

And, hey, if he and Venom weren’t the apogee of becoming one flesh, he didn’t know what was.

**_Eddie_** , Venom said, his voice even lower than usual, slow and sleepy. **_You are thinking about us. You are thinking about us a lot. And you feel good, which you should, when you think about us, but also a little worried. Don’t want you to be worried, Eddie. Not when you think about us. What can we do?_**

Well, the worry was because he knew he was going to have a weird conversation about human sex (or possibly masturbation) with his alien companion this morning. So. “Just listen, Venom, okay? I’m worried because I’ve got to explain something to you, and I’m not sure how you’re going to react.”

**_Hmm. This isn’t more bullshit about Earth parasites, is it?_ **

“No, nothing like that. Okay. I really don’t know how to start this conversation. Um. Take a quick survey of my body, V, and tell me if there’s anything you notice about it that’s different from, like, my default state.”

**_Of course. You have an erection_**.

Well, that was a very interesting word to hear in Venom’s low, rumbling voice. “Yeah, so—”

**_Have you been worried about the increasing frequency?_ **

Eddie laughed. “Sort of? In a way?”

**_You don’t need to be. They always happen at least a couple of times a night. It’s harmless. I like it when it happens. You always warm up with the change in blood flow._ **

Eddie laughed softly, and Venom hummed within his chest.

**_And, by the way, that is one of the reasons I hate whenever we go from bed to a cold shower. Wait. Wait just a minute. You take those cold showers only on the days you have an erection when you wake up. Why? Why? Cold showers suck!_ **

“V! Venom, I need you to listen.” Venom instantly quieted. And that was one of the subtler things to love about him. He delighted in being a pain in the ass, but only when Eddie was having a little bit of fun, too. Their interactions were all about _play_. If only Eddie didn’t mess this up, this could be absolutely fantastic. “Right. You’re right, I get erections for no reason while I’m asleep. But also it’s a sign of…of sexual arousal. So if I wake up with a hard-on, and I’m around someone sexy, that will just, like, reinforce it if I don’t do anything about it, and in a human situation the other human wouldn’t even have to know, because I could just jerk off in the shower, but that’s not an option here, because—”

**_We could jerk off in the shower—_ **

“Babe,” Eddie said. “I need you to listen.” The seams of his muscles seemed to tighten, and he could tell the whole of Venom’s attention was focused on him, now. It was almost terrifying. But after last night, he’d never be completely terrified of Venom again. He was his host, and now he knew what that meant. “I’ve been taking cold showers when I wake up with a hard-on because I’ve been being a dumbass and freaking myself out because the sexy person around me is _you_. I’ve been afraid of being sexually interested in an alien, and I think it scared me because it’s not just sex here, it’s not just a physical need, I mean, it sure is physical, but also—the way my life has changed with you, the way our lives are, being together—” He swallowed hard. Go for broke. Run your mouth. “I’m in love with you. I love you. And after our symbiosis last night, when it was finally our full symbiosis, I realized it was nuts to hide it anymore. And then I realized that the only form of intimacy I’ve got left to share is sex. But maybe you won’t think that means anything all, since you already live in my body and our minds have literally merged. And I know sex can be ridiculous, but it can also be meaningful with all the messy biology of it. And I could explain that it’s about reproduction, but there’s a whole lot more to it than that for most people. You can go in my head and see what it means to me. But. To keep it short. It’s as much intimacy, as much of a physical sign of love as I can offer. And that’s what I want with you! But I don’t even know if that’s something _you_ want, and I’m not going to ask you for it if you don’t want it, but I guess. I would like to jerk off in the shower now and then if you don’t want sex. But I’ll even avoid that if it makes you too uncomfortable.” He stared up at the ceiling. “That was a mess. Important thing in all that. I love you.”

For a moment there was nothing but silence. Then, all the external tension in his body suddenly relaxed, and he felt like he was melting into a warm puddle. Venom flowed up from his chest, pushing the blanket back, until he loomed over Eddie, his face attached to a rough version of his shoulders and arms and chest, splitting from Eddie at the waist.

**“Eddie,”** Venom said, his voice warm within the deep and terrifying (well, almost terrifying) rumble. **“I knew it! I knew it! It was in your mind and Anne’s when I kissed you! Sharing physical pleasure with a loved one is one of your favorite forms of intimacy! I thought maybe I had gotten it wrong when you never mentioned it afterwards. You only asked Anne about it that one time.”**

“I—uh. Babe.” Strange how that name still didn’t seem strange with those eyes and teeth and tongue and muscles looming above him. “Are you telling me that you meant that kiss _as_ a kiss even then?”

**“Of course,”** Venom said, then grinned a little wider. **“That made you harder. So…should I also tell you that I love you too? Yes.”** Venom sank down into Eddie a little, drawing closer. **“It’s important to you to hear the exact words. Well, I’ll say them every day, then. Maybe that’s inherently part of the symbiosis I always wanted. And you feel good when I say it. I love you, I love you, I love you,”** Venom said. **“And…you’re still nervous. Why?”**

“Cause I’m a dumbass,” Eddie said. “I’ll explain it later. The point is, my first impression of you is not of someone who would say I love you so easily.”

**“Saying I love you is the easiest thing about this,”** Venom said.

Eddie chuckled softly. “Wait a second,” he said. “You’re…you’re kind of nervous about this, too, aren’t you?”

**“What? What reason could I possibly have to be nervous?”**

“Who thinks about reasons when they’re nervous?” Eddie asked in reply. “All I know is that there’s some nervousness here that’s not mine.” He licked his lips. “I don’t think it’s bad to be nervous in this kind of situation.”

**“There is still a thought in you that says it would be cooler not to be nervous.”**

“That’s my societal conditioning, babe. It’s probably even more garbage than the stuff they fed you.”

Venom’s expression shifted subtly, and Eddie could feel his decision to be serious now, to go for broke like Eddie had.

**“If sex is the greatest physical intimacy you have to offer, Eddie, then I want to make sure that sex with me is the best you’ve ever had. You are the best host, so I want to be your best partner. Still…in symbiosis I know everything about you and me and what our symbiosis should be. I know more than you, anyway. But you know far more than I do about sex and what it should be like. You’re unlike any being I’ve ever encountered before. In so many ways you’re fragile compared to me—and you like that. But at the same time, Eddie, when I showed up you were already a lush, perfect ecosystem. I can offer you your life and health, but I don’t know exactly what else to offer to make myself worthy of you. But I do want to offer whatever I can.”**

“Babe,” Eddie said, reaching out to touch Venom’s smooth and gently yielding surface. “You don’t—” He stopped himself. He didn’t often know when to keep his mouth shut, but when he did…

His first impulse had been to reassure Venom by downplaying the moment. It’s just sex, babe, not that big a deal, just some reflexes and some rubbing and we can both forget about it for a while. But that would be an insult to what Venom had just told him. It would be an insult to what they both felt.

They didn’t want to feel like this meant less. They needed to feel that it was okay for it to mean as much as it did.

“We want this to be sacred,” Eddie said, now sliding both of his hands slowly up Venom’s arms.

**“Yes,”** Venom rumbled. **“But how can it be, when I want it because it’s part of the symbiosis I always knew as an abomination?”**

“I realized a long time ago that I had to trust my own judgement on what was sacred and what was an abomination,” Eddie said. “Do I feel sacred to you?”

**“Every cell of you,”** Venom said at once.

Go for broke. “And every ounce of you feels sacred to me.”

Venom grinned a little wider. **“It’s strange to want so much without hunger.”**

Eddie chuckled, even as blood rushed to his face and to his cock. “Where should we even begin?”

**“Our thoughts are not very clear right now,”** Venom said. **“We’ll have to be guided by you.”** He tilted his head. **“Don’t doubt. You’ll be good at it. You’re always good at explaining human things to me.”**

“I’ll explain why I doubted later, then.” He slid his hands up and over Venom’s heavily muscled shoulders, his mouth dry. And, to his shock, as he rested his hands to either side of his powerful neck, Venom rippled. It was an inhuman reaction, of course, but, touching Venom, he could tell what kind of human reaction it was close to—an aroused, overwhelmed shiver. And he hadn’t even done anything yet. “Venom? Babe? You okay?” Without thinking about it too much, he cupped the back of Venom’s head and used his thumbs to gently massage just below where a human’s ears would be, but for Venom ended up being where his jaw currently hinged. And the ripple happened again.

**“Eddie,”** Venom said, drawing out his name. **“We, I…I told you that in so many ways you were fragile compared to me, but…”**

“But what?” Eddie asked. What had he done to earn those ripples?

**“You are…so different in your physical form from me. I am always mutable, but even where you are soft, you have, underneath that softness, the scaffolding of your bones, unyielding. All your movements have that solidity underneath them, all of your touches…”**

Eddie smiled a little. “You’ve experienced for yourself how easily my bones break.”

**“The force that broke them was substantial,”** Venom said. **“Eddie, they suit you. There are many points in your body and your mind where you would break before you would bend.”**

“Is that really a good thing?”

**“You become stronger when you decide that breaking is not an option.”**

“Well…you’re getting kind of philosophical now, babe,” Eddie said, pressing his fingers firmly into Venom’s flesh and watching his reaction—eyes going squinty, jaw dropping open to let a few inches of tongue loll out. “I think you might have some reasons that are a little less abstract.”

**“Therrrrrrr—there is total solidity in you, my Eddie, for me. Like a planet. Eddie. Only for me. Safe. Care. And. Ahhh…”**

“Okay there, honey?” Eddie asked, but with a grin. Something akin to euphoria (with a strong dash of confusion mixed in) was coming from Venom to Eddie in flashes through their bond, and he was positive that Venom was actually a lot more than just okay, now. And, why, exactly? Eddie had an idea, and he’d used up all his wise silence for the day. “Did you just realize you have, like, whatever the opposite of a tentacle kink is?”

**“Don’t tease, Eddie. Keeeeep touching.”**

Okay. So that seemed like a definite yes. He grinned and kept massaging Venom’s flesh. The slower he moved his hands, the deeper he could sink his fingers in, and the more those wide white eyes turned into pearly crescents. The corners of that ghastly grin crept upward, and Venom’s maw opened enough to let his tongue creep ever further out of his mouth. It moved constantly, hypnotically, and Eddie figured he was doing something right when he could make it curl up tightly all of a sudden and then unroll slowly, slowly. It was weird, undeniably weird, but also undeniably awesome. So his current lover was an alien. At least his alien was also an alien-lover. He was so unbelievably lucky to be in this moment with Venom, to be causing this reaction in Venom.

In fact, he might have forgotten about his own desires entirely had not the ripples and shivers that spread through Venom’s form also travelled through the part of Venom that was still within him, just under his skin, making every nerve below their joined waist buzz with warmth and an unfamiliar pleasure.

“We’re getting warmer,” Eddie murmured, slowly and steadily pressing his hand into Venom’s analogue of a chest. Venom’s mouth was gaping now, his tongue stretching out now so close to Eddie’s face that he would only have to raise his head an inch or two to catch the tip between his own lips. And he wanted to. He didn’t know if the analogy was good, or what it would feel like for Venom, but he wanted that tongue in his mouth the way he’d wanted the clits and cocks of past lovers there. He needed that tongue pushing down his throat, filling him, tasting him, a glorious hybrid of a blowjob and a kiss, a single touch could probably set him off then, with that tongue, that tongue, that tongue in his mouth!

Venom shuddered around him, above him, within him, and Eddie’s eyes snapped open as he wondered how many specifics of that had gotten through. Venom’s own eyes were wide again, and they went wider when Eddie unconsciously flexed his fingers. Ah. As he’d been fantasizing, he’d managed to get both of his hands wrist-deep in Venom’s chest and shoulder.

**“No shit we’re getting warmer,”** Venom rumbled. **“We…may not have fully understood what this was going to be like.”**

“Uh. Should I take my hands out?”

Venom gave a deep sigh that included a little bit of a growl, a little bit of a purr, and Eddie’s mind was flooded with the sense of just how shocking and forbidden this pleasure, this intimacy was. He moaned involuntarily and his cock gave an almost painful throb, and only the fact that he was still untouched by anything but his boxers kept him from coming.

**“We don’t really want you to. But Eddie, Eddie, Eddie…you need to be naked now. You can take out your hands to take off your clothes. Because…we like to touch, don’t we?”**

“Yes, yes, we like to touch very much.” He drew his hands out of Venom, noticing as he did that Venom’s substance pulled back on him as he did. “Oh, baby, you don’t like any separation at all, do you?”

**“Never have to be separated again,”** Venom purred. **“Never want to. Not when being together feels like this.”**

Eddie groaned, tempted to sink into Venom again—the most sappy things sounded so erotic when they came out of Venom’s mouth. But instead he pushed himself up, Venom moving with him, of course, and hooked his fingers under the edge of his t-shirt. Now, in other circumstances he’d tried to do something similar and had ended up falling over rather than successfully taking off his clothes. This time, however, it worked perfectly. But, of course, this was the first time he had someone able to help him out with his own balance. He laughed a little. “Thanks for helping me finally look cool while doing that,” he said.

**“I don’t care about you looking cool. I care about you being naked.”**

To emphasize the point, Venom pushed Eddie’s shoulders back onto the bed and raised his hips, deftly removing his shorts with a few tendrils. They, and the blankets, ended up somewhere on the floor, completely forgotten. Eddie stared up at Venom, his biceps held so easily in his massive hands, that slick and flexible tongue again so teasingly close.

**“Want to cover you, Eddie,”** Venom said, building a little bit more of his form and moving the place where he and Eddie were joined to just below his navel.

“Oh, God,” Eddie said, as Venom leaned forward, touching more and more of his skin with his surface. Venom was warm and oh-so-pliant, his apparent musculature nothing but mimicry. He was tangible, and real, and overwhelming, and yet still so soft, moving and shifting to fit perfectly against Eddie’s body. “I—oh my God. Babe, I—I would love that, but I’m pretty sure that if you cover all of me, that is, including my cock, right now, I’ll come almost instantly. And then I’ll be, uh, out of the game, so to speak, for a while—”

**“Come,”** Venom said, slowly, consideringly, and Eddie almost did. **“We want you to come. On us. In us. If you fuck us we will share the peak of your pleasure, we will share that moment that you are so careful about sharing with others.  You want to fuck us. We want to get fucked  by you. We share everything, Eddie, why draw out this joining any longer?”**

Eddie whimpered a little as more of Venom emerged from the skin on his legs, forming tendrils that caressed and massaged over his feet, his calves, and up his thighs, and yet still stopped short of his straining cock. “I think,” he said, keenly aware that his breathing had become more like panting now, and that Venom could feel every bit of that change inside and out, “you’ve figured out why, just like you’ve figured out dirty talk pretty fucking quickly. There’s something to be said for drawing out the tension—”

**“But not for much longer,”** Venom said, **“Eddie, you are almost in distress.”**

A drop of viscous drool splashed down on Eddie’s chest with the hiss of that last s, and Eddie shuddered, but not with anything remotely close to revulsion. “Only almost,” Eddie breathed, shifting (squirming) under Venom’s touch. “I…if you’re going to take me in, I want to do something for you, too. Something that feels good to you. Like when I had my hands in you. But more. Is there anything more I can do?”

**“Everything feels good right now,”** Venom said, almost gruffly. He moved back just enough to flow his hands over Eddie’s chest and stomach, those white eyes narrowing when his substance gently sucked at Eddie’s sensitive nipples. **“We feel everything now, we don’t need to worry about who feels what, we—”**

“Babe,” Eddie said, raising his hands to cup Venom’s face below his glittering array of teeth. “You gave me symbiosis, and now I’m trying to show you sex. It’s—it’s important in this kind of intimacy that if I can give you any pleasure, that I do. So—anything. Anything. Baby, just tell me—” All of Venom rippled again, inside and outside of Eddie, and he groaned, feeling him start to pull at his hands again.

Venom stared at him with wide, white eyes for a few frantic heartbeats. **“I don’t _know_ ,”** he said abruptly, his eyes closing and his head dropping. **“I can’t think like this, it’s too much, it’s too alien, I never expected anything to feel like this, you’re telling me I should want more, but all I know I want is for you to be inside me and for us to come! The only other thing I could think of to do is—”** his eyes snapped open **“—is to kiss you.”**

“Yes,” Eddie sighed.

**“Yes,”** Venom said, his voice dropping lower. **“Yes, even in desperation, it was good, so good, to taste you.”** His tongue snaked down toward Eddie, who shivered, even though he felt almost hot enough to spontaneously combust by now.

But then, just the slightest touch of fear slipped through their bond. “What is it?” Eddie asked.

**“Your teeth won’t melt automatically,”** Venom said. **“You know how sensitive our tongue is, so you must be very, very careful.”**

“Oh, love, of course, of course,” Eddie said, trying not to laugh during his reassurance. If anyone was going to be concerned about teeth at a time like this, well, he’d assumed it would have been him. “I know how to be good.”

**“Yes, you do,”** Venom said. He shifted, opening his mouth a little farther.

Eddie gave a breathy laugh. “Oh, I think we’re going to like this.” Venom’s grin grew yet wider.

**“Well, we were right last time.”**

“Oh, yes. Babe? Before you do anything else, can you suppress my gag reflex? I think I can be more than good, then. I think I can be excellent.” Another ripple. A subtle shift in his throat.

And then: the deepest, softest voice he’d heard yet this morning. **“It’s done. Now?”**

“Now,” Eddie said, and opened his mouth as wide as he could, reaching out his own tongue to meet Venom’s.

Venom’s tongue plunged into Eddie’s mouth at the same time as Venom’s form shifted to envelop his cock. He had just a fraction of a second to be surprised, a fraction of a second to notice Venom’s taste—nothing bloody, almost nothing really, maybe a hint of slightly salty cucumber melon—before he was overwhelmed with other sensations. Around his cock, Venom didn’t feel like any human orifice, but he was still slick, and warm, and pulled and undulated around him in waves that immediately pulled a helpless moan from his throat. How—oh, how, it was impossible for anything to feel this good, and yet it was possible, it was happening right now in this very moment, this glorious moment and this glorious alien—

Some of those thoughts weren’t wholly Eddie’s own, but that only made him more desperate with desire. His hips jerked, thrusting into Venom even as Venom’s eager body made Eddie’s movements redundant. He held onto Venom’s shoulders like they were the only anchor he had to reality, and even they gave under his hands, letting his fingers sink slowly into places that now felt slicker, hotter than before, more like the opening Venom had formed for his cock than the ordinary (extraordinary) texture of Venom’s substance. He shuddered in the spaces Venom had made for him, hoping he could be enough for his alien lover, even as the powerful liquid movements of Venom’s body pulled him ever-closer towards orgasm.

Yet even amidst all the strangeness, there were some things that were intoxicatingly familiar. Venom’s hands remained hands roving over Eddie’s chest and arms and belly, and Eddie moaned again to think of himself like something small and precious under those massive, inky claws. And that—oh, he was just coherent enough to notice that the sound sent another wave of shocked pleasure from Venom’s mind to his own, and in the slight pause in Venom’s movements that followed, he was able to guess why. Venom could feel the vibrations of his voice against his tongue, and the affect was—well, the affect was like when any vibration of the right strength was placed against a particularly sensitive part of the body.

So it seemed like Eddie’s fantasy had come true, or at least almost true. Using that tongue _was_ the closest thing to physical sex for Venom, and Eddie was, in effect, giving him a kiss and a blowjob at the same time. And Eddie was getting face-fucked and kissed at the same time. He couldn’t really form a coherent thought about that, but he didn’t need to and so he didn’t care. There was a tongue in his mouth he could be paying attention to instead.

The texture on Venom’s tongue was more pronounced than that of a human tongue, but it wasn’t rough, and even the larger structures were so lubricated by drool that, without any gag reflex, they only slightly tickled the sides of Eddie’s throat—just gave him enough sensation to remind him that they were there—as Venom worked his tongue in and out of Eddie’s mouth, wiggling and tasting and thrusting. That tongue dove deeper into his throat than any cock could, and where his lips were stretched around it, it was thicker than any cock he’d ever experienced.

And the more Eddie let himself feel, the more intoxicating it was. He licked back against Venom’s tongue, in counterpoint to his movements, and was rewarded by a ripple that was almost fast enough to be a buzz, now. Through their bond, Eddie could tell that Venom had long since reached a point where he no longer had any frame of reference for what was happening with and between their bodies, and now he certainly no longer cared. His intermeshing with Eddie was becoming stronger and more complex in ways he’d never known existed, ways he would not have thought to ask for, but now that they were happening all he wanted was more, more, more.

More Eddie. Always more Eddie. Forever and ever, even if he still felt the tiny electric sparks of fear mixed with his desire for the experience of Eddie’s so-solid form, even if he felt like he was on the brink of being irreversibly changed, somehow, by everything he and Eddie were doing right now.

Eddie couldn’t figure out what to make of all of that right now, not when he was just about ready to burst from every bit of Venom’s amazing touch, but he thought he at least could show Venom that he didn’t need to be afraid of any pain he didn’t want as he took his pleasure. He closed his eyes, stretched his own jaw a little more, and, making sure his teeth were covered, _sucked_ on Venom’s astounding, marvelous, mind-melting tongue.

_I love you I love you I love you_ , he sent over the bond, trying to feel it in every cell as he pulled Venom closer and licked and sucked and thrust into that slick and undulating heat. Oh, it was too true, too true and too good, and there was no holding back now. With a moan that was loud even with the muffling effect of Venom’s tongue, Eddie came into Venom harder than he’d ever come in his life. The pleasure and relief seemed to go on and on, in wave after wave, like his body was trying to make up for lost time, like his release now included every potential orgasm he could have been sharing with Venom before.

**_Eddiieeeeee what…what was…_ **

Eddie wasn’t up for explanations right now. He felt fantastic, wrung out, brand new, and—though this might not have been just his own feeling—with no other purpose but to continue to suck and stroke his alien lover.

Yet, just as he was starting to get serious—his hands pushing in again, his throat working around Venom, he—they—were interrupted.

**_EDDIE, WHAT!_ **

Venom pulled his head back and gave an incoherent cry as something like a tidal wave of light and warmth and well-being and joy swept over Eddie’s entire body, pushed and spread through him by a richer feeling that seemed almost like sexual satisfaction, but wasn’t—or at least wasn’t his own satisfaction. It was an orgasm decoupled from anything so solid as a cock, and so, of course, it could only be Venom’s.

For a few long moments, afterward, they were both quiet. It had reached that time in the morning when sunlight finally streamed directly into the apartment. The dust motes in that light looked like glitter, and a stunning thought occurred to Eddie: _We’re really happy. And we could get used to being this happy._

He smiled, wondering if Venom could feel its softness. At the moment, he seemed pretty dead to the world, his chest pressed against Eddie’s, his head resting against the join between Eddie’s neck and shoulder. Weirdly enough, Venom wasn’t heavy like this, though he still covered Eddie with a comforting weight. That kind of thing had to do with density, right? Or maybe Venom would automatically avoid squashing him.

Eddie ran his hands gently  up and down Venom’s back, glad that he hadn’t retreated into his body yet. He liked to cuddle after sex, especially really awesome sex, and—

**“Eddie. What. What the fuck _was_ that?”**

Eddie’s soft smile turned into a grin. “I think you had an orgasm, babe.”

**“An…orgasm. An. I have mastered human language for the most part but, just to check, this…‘an’ means that it is one of possibly many similar experiences, yes?”**

“Uh, true,” Eddie said. “But in my case I have to rest a while first,” he added quickly, knowing Venom’s tendency to throw himself headfirst into things he liked.

**“I’m not surprised,”** Venom said. **“If it felt for you like it felt for me.”**

“Well, I think it was something similar,” Eddie said. “But it probably wouldn’t be exactly the same, what with us being different species and all.”

Venom considered that for a moment. **“It doesn’t make sense for me to be able to have an orgasm. Klyntar don’t need an incentive like that to make sure reproduction happens. And even with the way…the way you treated my tongue…”**

Eddie raised his head to give Venom a quick kiss on the side of his neck, the only place he could reach with his mouth right then. “Baby, I’ve got extra joints in my arms and legs now so our symbiosis can work when you’re on the outside. You changed me for symbiosis. Maybe I somehow changed you for sex?”

Venom gave a rumbling hum of agreement, then suddenly pushed up, alarmed. **“That’s what they said! That’s the danger! The danger of symbiosis is _changing_ , and not being a klyntar anymore, and being some awful hybrid, and never being able to go back home, and it’s all true, and I am an abomination, and—”**

“Venom! Venom, holy shit, please, slow down, I’m sorry, I don’t know anything, I didn’t want to freak you out, I just—” He pushed himself up and threw his arms around Venom. “What we’ve got is a good thing! We both know that! You’re not an abomination just because you came with a guy! You’re not an abomination at all!”

Venom shivered within his arms, but Eddie could tell he was starting to relax at the same time.

**“You saw some of my time before you,”** he said, finally. **“You could have asked why I would want to go back and be part of klyntar society at all.”**

“Well. From what I saw, they treated you pretty shittily, and I’m not going to lie, I would be willing to fight anyone who ever made you feel like your whole self was wrong. But that’s your past and I know…I know that sometimes things are complicated. I want you to feel however you need to feel about them. But I can definitely have an opinion about us, and how we are now.”

Venom rested his head against Eddie’s, and wrapped his tongue loosely around the side of Eddie’s face for a few moments. **“Eddie. Eddie. If you changed me somehow, I’m glad. They would hate it. But how can I care, when you’re my host, and you wanted to share sex with me because you love me? I shouldn’t have panicked. Klyntar isn’t home, anyway. I didn’t want to say that. Because you’re my home, Eddie.”**

“Babe,” Eddie said, because he really wanted to say something. He wanted to cuddle, and he felt like Venom needed something similar, but for someone like Venom, it wouldn’t be the same, would it? What did he need to do? It was probably—ah, yes. It wasn’t exactly what he wanted to have, but definitely what he wanted to give. “Babe, come back inside. Get comfy. See if you like what happened to all my brain chemicals.”

Venom grinned a little more, and slipped just the tip of his tongue inside Eddie’s mouth, just for a moment, before gratefully sinking back under Eddie’s skin. Eddie lay back on the bed, basking in the sunlight, waiting through the somehow both unsettling and comforting feeling of Venom settling in throughout his body.

**_Oh!_** Venom said, shortly after Eddie had felt him climb up his spine and into his skull. **_This is even better than the hot tub. The sex did this? The orgasm did this?_**

“Probably,” Eddie said. “We can look up more details later. Right now we’re going to go take a shower—a good hot one, no more cold ones ever, not on purpose, anyway.”

**_Yes!_** And then Venom must have noticed Eddie glancing down at himself and seeing that he wasn’t quite as messy as he would have expected after sex. **_Don’t be surprised. All your cells are delicious, Eddie._**

“You know, I’m really not surprised. Yeah. Not after everything else.” He made a face. “I’m just kind of embarrassed at how I find that kind of hot.”

**_Hmmm. I am going to try to pay a lot of attention to the things you find hot, Eddie._ **

Eddie chuckled. “Yeah? Uh, well, that’s pretty hot, too. And the sentiment’s mutual.”

**_Oh. Eddie. Well. We—we have more questions. Is it normal to be hungry after sex? And it’s the weekend, right? Is your period of rest less than the length of the weekend? Do we have to do anything this weekend? Can I do anything in your body to make your rest period less? Are there other ways to have sex?_ **

Eddie pushed himself out of bed and headed toward the shower. “Let me see if I’ve got all that. One, sure, though it seems like you’re not clamoring for live food right now, which is interesting. Two, yes. Three, yeah, a lot less, actually. Four, I’m gonna go with no. Nothing but sex, snacks, and invasive hunting, if that’s what we want. Five, probably, but I don’t know exactly what. I’m cool with experimenting, though. Six, for sure, definitely. Probably more ways with you than anyone else. We can…we can do a lot of experimenting in that department, too.”

**_Eddie! This is going to be a great weekend!_ **

“Did you already know I was going to let you make a potato sundae for breakfast?”

**_Eddie! It’s more than that!_ **

“Yeah, I’m going to stop wearing clothes when we go out and you’re on the outside, too.”

**_Eddie! Thank you! But it is more than that, too!_ **

Eddie smiled. “Yeah. I know it is, babe.”

**_I love you, Eddie._ **

“I love you, too.”

**Author's Note:**

> On Monday they meet Anne for lunch and she's like, "Eddie, the last time I saw that expression on your face was when we went to meet my parents after that weekend at the cabin."  
> Venom agrees that the expression is right for this situation.
> 
> Here are the mini cookies for everyone who smiled at the name of the hotel: OOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO
> 
> The structure that Venom is talking about in Eddie's brain that blocks connections and bolsters the ego is called the Default Mode Network, and I learned about it and its relationship to things like psychedelics and meditation in the book "How to Change Your Mind" by Michael Pollan.
> 
> Thank you all for reading!


End file.
